Fox Cities TV is an independent blog and member-driven community based in Green Bay, Wisconsin and serves the Northeast Wisconsin area, including Green Bay, Appleton, and Oshkosh. TV lovers can come here to learn about what's happening in local (and national) television, interact with other TV viewers and express their opinions.
Mark David Zahn is the founder and chief editor of Fox Cities TV, as well as an avid pop culture geek, writer and technology lover. Learn more about Mark on his FoxCitiesTV profile or e-mail him here. Mark is available to journalists for interviews on local TV issues by e-mail.
Consumer Reports has rated
Consumer Reports has rated some of the available converter boxes at:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/electronics-computers/televisions/dig...
But TV reception starts with the right antenna. Viewers should certainly try their old antenna first. It’s true that any of these older antennas will pick up some signals, maybe all the broadcast signals a viewer wants to receive, depending on their location. If they’re getting all the OTA channels they want and almost completely uncompressed DTV and HDTV, unlike cable or satellite, than they’re good to go.
Many of the TV antenna designs now in use and on the market today such as the Yagi and rabbit ears have technology roots going back 30 years or more and are now going to work well with the digital chip sets in converter boxes.
Most designs in use now were developed prior to the advent of much of the computer technology, software and algorithms in common use today left open numerous avenues to improve upon tried and true designs and develop new ones. Additionally, recent regulations and standards opened new doors for antenna engineers to develop much smaller antennas with greatly improved performance and aesthetics. Welcome to the digital age.
Antenna elements are based on the size of the waves they're designed to receive, and VHF frequencies are lower so the waves are longer, requiring a larger antenna surface to receive them. It is now possible to build a much more powerful and efficient UHF antenna (where most of the digital broadcast signals will be located) with more elements for stronger reception while keeping the antenna size physically very much smaller than old antennas.
The efficiency of an antenna tells us how much of the power makes it to the cable. In all antennas, a portion of the energy is wasted. For most antennas, mismatch loss is the single largest factor in determining the efficiency of the antenna. Older antennas are less efficient.
While it’s correct that antennas can’t tell the difference between analog and digital signals, there are definitely certain models which have higher DTV batting averages than others. Not all antennas are equally suited for DTV. A percentage of viewers will require something a little more tailored for DTV reception.
While cable and satellite program providers will continue to serve the great majority of homes as the primary signal source, missing HD local reception, compression issues, higher costs, billing add-ons, service outages, contact difficulties, in-home service waits and no shows have left many of these subscribers looking to OTA antennas as a good, alternative.
With one of the newer and smaller OTA antennas, with greatly improved performance, power and aesthetics, viewers may also be able to receive out-of-town channels, carrying blacked out sports programs, several additional sub-channels or network broadcasts not available locally. And for those with an HDTV, almost completely uncompressed HD broadcasts.
OTA viewers can go to antennapoint.com to see quickly what stations are available to them, the distance, UHF or VHF and compose heading to help in choosing and aiming their antenna. And if they decide to buy a newer antenna, they should buy it from a source that will completely refund their purchase price, no questions asked, if it doesn’t do the job for them.
Post new comment