Digital TV Converter – 1 – The Old Analog Antenna Days
I just got a chance to play around with one of the new digital tv converter boxes and I wanted to give a series of articles on it so that you would have a clearer idea of where broadcast tv is going to be after this analog to digital conversion and what things will look like. First off, I wanted to give you a summary of our location, our previous over the air (OTA) reception of tv (analog) and give the background of why I’m interested in making sure we get digital reception. So, I live in Western North Carolina… Buncombe County to be precise in an area north of Asheville. Back before cable arrived….
We probably used to receive maybe 3-4 stations. Now, by receive…. WLOS 13 in Asheville came in, but with quite a bit of ghosting, it was good enough (and the analog still is) to make out the audio of the program. This is the closest station to us physically and the main reception problem we have is that we are on the north side of the Elk Mountains and the “view” in this area is of Tennessee, not south to Asheville, so we get reflections.
The other channels we used to get were along the lines of a PBS (2 out of Sneedsville TN) and a CBS or two… I think 6 and 9 were the channels, I could probably search and identify them, one could have been NBC. Now, the picture wasn’t good. In fact it’s kind of funny the kinds of picture problems we call the cable company about now in comparison. We would have thought we lived next to the transmitter to receive even half as good a signal as our worst days on cable.
So, you can see why when cable came to this area we went for it. Our “view” turned to the south and our local stations became WYFF 4, WSPA 7 and WLOS 13 (NC). Except for WLOS, these were Greenville/spartanburg NBC/CBS affiliates. I think I recall hearing audio on 4 before cable, but not much more than that. Do we still use antenna? When there’s a storm yes… to get the cable signal out here they make use of several repeaters between the main line and our house (I know of at least 2). These are powered and when the power is lost, our cable is out – battery powered tv or not, we need an antenna for storms/power outages if we want local tv news.
So, that is where we were before cable and are in the few times that the cable is out. I’ve been able to get by through our recent storms with a little indoor antenna for OTA reception of the only local station we can pull in that way (and the only one we’d “need” if there were a local storm going on.) So, that’s all going to change with digital, will it be better or worse? I’ve read that digital will be an all or nothing proposition and in areas with a clear field of view it sounds excellent, but what about rural/suburban mountain communities? We’ll see as this series continues.
