DTV Transition Plus Two Days
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Well, it’s been two days and I haven’t seen news of anyone spontaneously exploding or otherwise expiring.
The long day’s journey into night has taken place. We now have digital television and all is well with the world – sort of.
Proving that lying is more popular than ever, the station I wrote about a couple of days ago, which was bragging about coming into digital broadcasting at its original position of channel 9, at full power, did not. The change did not help either, as it now is harder to receive than during the pre-transition time.
I looked around, after rescanning a couple of times during the 48 hours between Thursday midnight and Saturday midnight, and though I have 61 available channels, probably 10 of them are unavailable at certain times of the day with the present antenna setup. I’ll be getting a new one to alleviate the problem. Of the 61 channels, 28 of them are foreign language broadcasters, so it is not quite the movable feast one might think. The joys of the melting pot, I guess. There are several Spanish channels, a few Korean channels, and a Vietnamese channel – I’m still wondering why there is not a French channel, a German channel, or a Russian channel.
Good to know that we have made the change with little fuss, especially from the majority of the public, which has once again been fleeced of a natural resource, the EM spectrum, and will be paying for new usage that was never necessary.
The PC Magazine article that calls itself a wrap up cites 317,500 calls on Friday, probably a lot less than they had imagined.
My Sunday evening television news, in all its digital glory, reports that the current total, as of 7 p.m. PDT, over 722,000 calls were answered.
Of course, we don’t know the number of actual answers given. It’s certainly not over, but it is going better than anyone had a right to expect.
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7 Comments
leftystrat
June 14th, 2009
at 11:00pm
61 channels? Damn.
21 here. All garbage.
DTV Transition Plus Two Days « AccessTech News
June 15th, 2009
at 5:12am
[...] DTV Transition Plus Two Days the oracle Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:17:49 GMT [...]
DTV Transition Plus Two Days « The BAT Channel
June 15th, 2009
at 5:18am
[...] DTV Transition Plus Two Days the oracle Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:17:49 GMT [...]
the oracle
June 15th, 2009
at 7:44am
leftystrat, remember that 28 of them are foreign language!
Also, it’s amazing how much duplication there is on the various PBS subchannels. For example, they all carry PBS-Create, which is great (I watch it all the time), but it is always found that 2 of them are showing identical programs at the same time.
There is also channel 13, which I could get the analog component of just fine, but could not get the pre-jump UHF digital component, nor can I get it now, after the return to channel 13. This is very strange because they are both owned by Fox, and channel 11 co-locates its antenna with 13. Also, if you go to their websites they show an absolutely identical polar coverage map (it has the same name, when you mouse over it). Channel 11 comes in pretty well, with few problems most of the day.
Some more of the ‘truth’ we are always given…
Mike Licht
June 15th, 2009
at 9:35am
The DTV transition is no trouble at all if your cables are correctly bipolarized. Go to Screen 47 of the DTV Converter Box On-Screen Installation Guide and use the resident GPS to correctly align your antenna for each channel (allowing for local ionospheric conditions) and ARRRGGGHH!
Technical reference:
http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/tv-d-day-usa/
the oracle
June 15th, 2009
at 12:03pm
Mike Licht, it was okay once, but this is not a place for advertising your site. Please refrain from doing so - otherwise, feel free to say anything you wish.
Thanks.
leftystrat
June 15th, 2009
at 8:22pm
I suspect I got 21 because I checked at work, which is basically an old warehouse, through which very little signal flows.
Oh boy, foreign language tv. That will certainly come in handy if I need to learn a foreign language by total immersion.
I tried briefly at home but didn’t come up with much more. I had a killer yagi antenna too.
Oh yeah… and a ton of religious broadcasting. The only thing we’re missing here is the Ballet Channel.