I TRY not to respond to OT posts, but boy am I fed up with DTV! I could get all the high power analog stations in my market snow-free with a small rooftop antenna. No go with DTV so I've been incrementally upgrading. I now have a very large antenna residing at 70 feet on one of my towers. Now I can get SOME of the digital signals. I'm going to try a mast mounted amplifier as soon as I'm able to climb again (currently recovering from surgery). I've already tried several TVs with ATSC tuners and converter boxes. There is some variation, but none of them can get all the digital signals that theoretically should be available to me.
According to the FCC and other resources, I should be getting all of the high power DTV stations. I have talked to engineers at two of the stations I'm having trouble getting. They both said more than likely I'm getting a too high bit error rate due to signal multipath with all the hills around here. They said it is proving to be an issue for some viewers, and suggested I try VERY large directional antennas and experiment with antenna bearings, but admitted I'd probably need several antennas, one for each DTV station I'm not yet getting. Aarrgh! But of course many DTV's and converter boxes can only add channels by auto search; there's no provision for adding channels manually. That pretty much rules out switching between multiple antennas, unless I got the timing just right while the TV was performing its channel search. I could combine several antennas, but then I'd probably have the high BER due to signal reflections again. Grrr! Oh, and some of the stations that were/are broadcasting analog on VHF now have temporary UHF DTV assignments (higher power than their analog VHF). Next month they will be switching digital broadcasts to their old VHF channel assignments. This will probably change what I'm able to get and not get yet again... this time in the middle of a Maine winter. Grrr! Thanks FCC, or whoever is to blame for this bit of idiocy. I will admit when it works, picture and sound quality is fantastic with DTV. Being able to get free OTA HDTV is nice too. Paul
