TechnoBabble

I got a nice call today from fellow blogger Cindy Kay. She asked me a question about the transition that I had not really thought about. Her question was would the radios that people can buy for bad weather that has AM/FM radio and the TV sound band still work after February 17th? She asked because you can still buy those radios from stores and the Red Cross. I didn't the know the Red Cross sold those kind of radios but I guess it makes sense.

To answer her question, no, even those emergency radios will not work with TV audio after February 17th since there will be no TV stations broadcasting analog pictures or sound. The AM/FM radio section of those radios will continue to operate, but if you have bought one of those emergency radios for bad icing and such so you can hear the weather with Van and Emily and Charles and Tom, then that part will not work anymore. This also goes for the handheld TV sets that many people take with them on vacations and to ball games and such. They will not work after February 17th either. There are currently no replacements on the market that I have seen, but I suspect very shortly you will start to see them as manufacturers shift from pumping out converter boxes for the transition. Right now that is all most manufacturers are thinking of. Getting you TV for the transition and then worry about the other receivers after the crunch of February.

Also, there is a new law just past that will allow stations who choose to remain broadcasting in analog for up to 30 days after February 17th. But before you go "what the hey?" it is only stations that will not cause interference to digital stations and they are only allowed to broadcast information about the transition or emergency communications only. Stations who elect to do this can not broadcast regular programming on their analog for that 30 day "nightlight" period. After that, even those stations must cease broadcasting. We here at FOX8 will not be able to participate in that since we have to move our digital signal from channel 35 back to channel 8 on February 17th so we will not have a analog transmitter to keep on the air! What the other stations in the area will do, we haven't heard yet since this is just breaking.

Looks like the next and last DTV test will be January 15th. More on that when I get more information.

Are you DTV ready? 

At 6:27pm on Wednesday, December 17th, you will have the opportunity to test your TV's again to see if they are DTV ready. This will be a two minute test and for our Spanish speaking viewers, we will have our very own Angela Rodriguez  handling those duties while Neill McNeill does the English chores.

English will be on the main channel and Spanish will be on the SAP or second audio programming channel. This will be on the analog channel only. For those people who are watching our digital channel and for those cable systems that are taking our digital signal, you will not see it. But if you are watching our analog via an antenna or the cable or sat service you subscribe to hasn't switched to digital signal yet, you wil see it.  And yes, all of the cable companies have told ME personally that they will have our digital signal avalable to their subscribers on February 18 after we turn off the analog channel 8 signal on the 17th.

And speaking of our channel 8 digital signal of February 18, the last part needed to complete the conversion of our back up transmitter has arrived. And here is a picture of it:

Of course you are saying, "what the heck is THAT!?" That is what is called a "mask filter" and it helps to make sure our digital signal doesn't cause interference to other stations. The mask filter goes between the transmitter and the antenna in the transmitter room. After first of the year, we will start the conversion of the auxiliary transmitter and we hope by January 25th, we will have it ready to fire up! I hope we get a chance to test it on air at the end of January or first of February and if we do, I will post a blog about the time and date (it will be in the WEE hours of the morning so you will need to get up REALLY early to see it!) if we can arrange it. The rest of the parts needed to convert the main transmitter are due in after first of the year so things should time out fairly well. About the time we get the backup transmitter up and running, it will be time to turn off the analog and then we can start converting it to digital as well. Lots to do and not much time to do it all in!

Stay tuned! Are you digital ready?

 

If you watch TV with an antenna (and we KNOW there are lots of you because we have been hearing from you!) you may be a little a confused about how to connect that converter box to your TV. Well I will see if I can help sort out some of the confusion.

There is one component that you must have. That is a TV! That was easy wasn’t it?! Ok, seriously, after you purchase your converter box and get it home and unpack it from its box and you should have at least the following:

1. Converter Box

2. Several kinds of cables

3. Instruction manual

OK, what next?

1.  You want to unhook the antenna connector at the back of your TV set.

2.  In the cables that came with your converter box, you should see a single cable that is about the size of your pinky finger with what is called F connectors on each end. This is a screw on connector exactly like the one on your antenna cable. Connect one end to your antenna connector on your TV and the other end to the converter box that says TO TV SET or something similar. Connect your antenna cable to the converter box to the connector called FROM ANTENNA or FROM ANT.

3.  Set the converter box near your TV set and plug the AC power cord into an outlet.

4.  Turn on your TV to channel 3

5.  Turn on your converter box. It should begin to display a welcome message and menu and by using the remote control that came with the converter box follow the instructions shown. Those instructions will include a scan of the TV channels to see what digital stations are available.

From then on you will use the converter box to change channels while your TV set will stay on channel 3. But you will enter the old analog channel numbers to select the station you wish to watch and because of the channel scan you did, the converter box will know which station to tune from your channel selection. You may be asking yourself, why does the converter box need to know what channel a certain station is on? Channel 8 is channel 8, right? Well, not exactly.

As you have probably figured out, analog and digital doesn’t mix. It is like water and vinegar. We have to broadcast our digital signal on a separate channel to not interfere with our analog channel. In our case, our digital channel is 35 and every other station broadcasts their digital signal on a different channel than their analog signal as well. To keep from totally confusing you, the system is designed where each station transmits data about itself, such as call sign and its analog channel number. You don’t have to remember that FOX8 is on digital channel 35, you just keep remembering that FOX8 is channel 8. You enter channel 8 to your converter box and it remembers for you that FOX8 is on channel 35. Your converter box will even tell you the channel number is channel 8 all the time receiving our digital signal on channel 35.

You will also have access to the Program Guide we transmit as well. This is a listing of programming for the station. Some converter boxes will store several hours worth of programming, some only the current programming information and some will have several days worth of programming. The length of time will depend on the manufacturer.

If you have a VCR, you will also need a converter box for it as well if you want to record one program while you watch another program. You would connect the converter box to the VCR in the same manner as your TV but taking the output of the VCR to your TV as you have it have it now. You will need a splitter to split your antenna to run to both converter boxes. I know some of the help lines tell you to gang the converter boxes together running the coax cable from one box to the other, but that doesn’t work.

There are other configurations depending if you have a sound system connected and such and that is what the other cable with the RCA connectors on the end are for to run from the convert box to your sound system. That is more complicated and beyond this simple explanation.

Remember that sometime after you wake up on February 18, you will need to do a rescan of channels on all of your converter boxes. This is because some digital stations will be changing channels. FOX8 is one of those stations. When we cease analog broadcasting on February 17 on channel 8, we will also cease digital broadcasting on channel 35 and turn on a new digital signal on channel 8. The only way your converter box will know that we have changed digital channels is for you to rescan your channels on all of your converter boxes and let it pick up our new digital signal on channel 8. If you do not, your converter box will continue to look for us on channel 35 when you enter 8 on your remote control.

Are you DTV ready?

It is now 90 days left until television as we have known it changes forever. I look around at the work that has been done here at the station in preparations for this day and I just can’t believe that we will be turning off our venerable analog transmitter on February 17, 2009, FOREVER. Forever. That is a long time.

The meetings and discussions are getting closer and closer now as the day approaches and even though I know we will push that big red button OFF for the last time in analog, it is still a little surreal. This will mark the first time in US history that we have stopped using a broadcasting format and for no more reason than it is “out of date.” It is interesting to note that the UK has done this several times. In the 1980’s the Brit’s turned off their original TV signals that were black and white and only 405 lines of resolution. Those TV signals were all VHF signals as well. Their “colour transition” started in the late 60’s when they introduced color 625 line UHF television. By the 1980’s there were enough color 625 line UHF TVs in the country they felt comfortable in turning off the old VHF system. Other European countries soon followed suit. But not only did the UK shut down their VHF system, at the same time they introduced a change in the sound transmission of their TV signals from analog to a system called NICAM where the picture is analog and the audio is digital.  The UK is now in the process of turning off all analog TV signals as well, but they are not slated to do that until 2011. The UK started their digital transition 6 months ago using a regional approach to turning off analog by having the BBC station stop programming and broadcast an information graphic about where to find BBC programming on digital and then 30 or 60 days later, the other stations turning off their analog transmitters, something many people here said should have been. Of course here, we are slated to just turn off our analogs as if they never existed and go on our merry way. There is an attempt to put some 11th hour legislation in that would provide what is being called, “Analog Nightlight.” This is where stations that can keep their analog transmitters on the air past February 17th to do so for 30 days to run an information graphic about where to find their digital programming. This is all well and good, but many people think this should have been thought of LONG before now. We will see if it passes. Of course this doesn’t help WGHP since we are moving our digital signal back to channel 8 on the 17th of February, but it might be something to consider for other stations who are just turning off their analog transmitters since they would be staying on their digital channels.

The good news is that 85% of the population will not be effected by the change because they are connected to satellite or cable. The conversion is being done there for those people. The other 15% that receive their TV via antenna, many already have purchased the converter boxes and are viewing digital TV now. Those who haven’t moved in the “digital direction” will be watching static on February 18th, or stations with information graphics if Congress passes the Analog Nightlight law.

In our own progress to towards February 17th, the parts needed for conversion of our channel 8 transmitters have started to arrive. The plan is to have the auxiliary transmitter converted and tested by the end of the year. After that we should have all the parts ready to convert the main transmitter to digital. We will start that part of the process on February 18th after we stop broadcasting analog. While we do that, for the week or so that it will take to convert it and get it ready to put on the air, we will be broadcasting digital with our auxiliary transmitter. That is how we will be able to turn off analog channel 8 and turn on digital channel 8 immediately. Of course at the same time that happens, we will be turning off our channel 35 digital transmitter for good as well since we aren’t allowed to broadcast on two channels digitally at the same time. So as you can see, still lots of work to do, even after all the work that has been done.

We do thank you for watching FOX8 WGHP all these years in analog and we look forward to continue to serve you in the digital TV world.

Are you "DTV Ready?"

As we get closer to February 17, 2009, things are ramping up fairly quickly now.

In response to a request made by FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein to ION Media Networks to organize a DTV Transition testing campaign across the country, ION, along with NBC Universal, Telemundo, and members of the Association of Public Television Stations, will spearhead DTV "soft tests" or analog shut-off tests in major markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Hartford, CT.

The test will begin in New York City, with a two-minute shutdown between 5:59 and 6:01 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 28 and then for one minute will take place in Los Angeles and Washington DC on Tuesday, Dec. 2, and two 30-minute tests in Hartford on Wednesday, Dec. 3. These broadcasters are already participating in existing tests being conducted across the country.

We here at FOX8 WGHP have been independently and collectively with other stations doing these "soft tests"  and will continue doing them for one minute during various newscasts of the day on every 17th of the month until the transition on February 17th, 2009 so you can check your readiness for the DTV Transition.

The bottom line is the industry and the government is ramping up efforts to be sure you, the public, is fully aware of what is coming and what you need to do to be ready. Again, if you have cable or satellite, those providers will take care of the transition for you. You will need to do nothing. Any TV's you have that are connected to an antenna of any kind, will need to be digital ready by either having a new digital TV or an analog to digital converter box. You can contact the government at 888-388-2009 or http://www.dtv2009.gov for up to two $40 each coupons to help defray the cost of the $60 converter boxes. Other questions can be answer by calling 888-CALL-FCC or http://www.dtv.gov or for local questions, you can call 336-821-1144 here at the station and we will try and answer your questions the best we can. or http://media.myfoxwghp.com/special/head/DTV/index.html


Are you DTV Ready?

It is hard to believe we are now less than 4 months away from saying good bye to analog television broadcasting. A form of broadcasting that has been around since the 1930's. Great Britian actually had the first form of broadcasting in the late 1920's and ealry 30's called the Baird System. It was extremely crude by today's standards. It used something called a Nipkow disk.

You may very well be asking yourself, what the heck is a Nipkow disk? In very generic terms, it was a disk with holes punched in it that moves out from the center in a swirl pattern. Light is shown though it and a photo sensitive material "records" the image and its transmitted to a receiver that is also has a nipkow disk for viewing. Of course you could it call it "No Def" TV since it was pretty hard to watch anything on it. There is a whole section of Google on it. If you are a geek, it is swell reading.

John Logie Baird in the 1930's improved on the Nipkow disk to provide a "standard" def of 30 lines resolution. The first BBC TV programs were shown to about 200 receivers using this system. Even though it was a huge jump in technology, we would call it "No Def" today as well.

About this same time, a farmer turned inventer named Philo T. Farnsworth was developing a totally new way to transmit pictures. The electron scanning tube or as we better know it today, Cathode Ray Tube or CRT came out of his experimentations. As a boy Farnsworth plowed row after row after row at his fathers farm in Rigby, Idaho; the plowing back and forth, back and forth stuck in his mind. Later when developing electro-mechanical television, this moving back and forth lead the way to making CRT system work by scanning one line of resolution at a time and then returning, the same way a field plowed. In 1927 he showed is invention, "image dessector," the for runner to the CRT, to an engineer from the RCA Company named Vladimir Zworykin.

Zworkin had been trying to develop a similar system at Westinghouse but had been unsuccessful. He had recently gone to work for RCA, who also was trying to develop an electro-mechanical television. Years later, after Farnsworth's death,  the courts ruled that Zworkin, while in the employ of RCA had stolen the Farnsworth form of CRT and made RCA pay millions in back royalties to Farnsworth's estate.

Along the way, in 1951, CBS developed a form of color television using a "color wheel." This was a spinning wheel with colored pieces of material that allowed light through to produce a color picture. The competing RCA NTSC color system we use today was chosen over CBS's color wheel.

I bring all this up to point out that even though we are about to bid analog TV good bye, many of the inventions from the early days of TV are still in use, such as the CRT is now used to project light in projection TV's instead of display light as the old CRT TV's and the color wheel is back, being used in DLP and LCD HDTV's.

Just goes to show you that what goes around comes around! Here comes February 17th!

The Hawaiian Association of Broadcasters have announced that all of the full power TV stations in the state will cease analog broadcasts at noon on January 15, 2009. This is due to the US Government prompting them to dismantle the analog TV sites before the Hawaiian petrel breeding season on Maui.

The Hawaiian TV stations were denied colocation of their digital transmitters with their analog transmitters because of this bird and the US observation station across the road from the transmitters. Those transmitters were reloacted to a mountain that is about 4000 ft lower than the current analog sites.

WGHP will be doing another DTV Test to see if you are DTV ready. This will be on Friday morning at 8:15 during the FOX8 Morning News.

As with the last time, if your TV is connected to cable or satellite, no matter what your screen says, your provider WILL do the conversion for you. DO NOT WORRY. YOU ARE COVERED. But any TV that is connected to an outside antenna or rabbit ears, you will need to either get a cable or satellite connection or a converter box or a new TV. For the $40 government coupon's for the digital to analog converters for your analog TV's, you can call 888-388-2009 or on the web at www.dtv2009.gov to order your coupons.

For the test, you will see one of the two different color screens.

If you see the screen with the blue background:

this means your TV is receiving our digital signal, either via your antenna or cable or satellite and you have nothing more to do. You are all set!!

If you see the screen with the red background:

this means that either your cable or satellite provider hasn't started converting our digital signal to analog yet or if your TV is digital ready it isn't on our digital channel either over the air or on digital cable (Time Warner and Lexcomm channel 510)/HD satellite (DIrecTV HD channel 8/Dish Network HD channel 8) or your TV isn't able to decode our digital signal and you need to do more to to continue to watch WGHP.

We will do a test every 17th of the month at different times of the day until February 17th, 2009 when you have to be ready one way or another!

If you have questions, feel free to call us here at the station or 888-CALL-FCC or 888-DTV-2009.

Are you ready for the next DTV Test?

Did you see the 60 sec DTV Test we did at the end of the 6PM newscast on September 17? If you saw a red screen, then more needs to be done to be digital ready. If you saw a blue screen, then you are digital ready!

There was some confusion after the test because many cable and satellite companies have yet to finish their conversions for the TV stations and those customers saw the red screen. Let me say again, as Neil and Julie said on air, any TV that is connected to a cable box or the cable line directly or a satellite box, DirecTV or Dish Network, even if you saw the red screen, those providers WILL have the digital signal available to those TV sets by February 17, 2009 and you passed the test. If you have a TV set in a bedroom that doesn't have cable and you have rabbit ears on it, then even though other TV sets in your house may be ready, those TV's connected to either rabbit ears or an outside antenna will need to be connected to cable or you will need to purchase a new TV or a converter box.

If none of your TV's are connected to cable or satellite but are connected to rabbit ears or an outside antenna, you will need to add a converter box or purchase a new TV or add cable or satellite service to continue to watch TV.

If you need to get a converter box, the government will pay for 2 boxes up to $40 each. You can request your converter box coupons at http://www.dtv2009.gov or you can call 1-888-388-2009..

If you have any further questions, feel free to leave them here on this post and I will be happy to answer you.

Did you pass the test?

Monday September 8 at precisely 12 noon, the United States officially began turning off analog transmitters and began to broadcast in digital only; if you live in Wilmington. Wilmington is the "test" market to see what would happen if a market didn't have analog TV anymore. Well the Sun didn't explode, the heavens didn't come down, the dead didn't rise and as best I can tell, people along the Azalea Coast still are watching television. A better picture, in digital.  Even the retired folks on fixed incomes.

Early word 24 hours into the future world of digital television is that things went off without a hitch. Some Elon University media students are manning a phone bank at Southeast Community College answering any questions that might arise and as of last night, they had taken about 90 calls and only one caller had no idea what was going on. Most calls consisted of people who didn't have their new digital TV's or converter boxes set up correctly or people living beyond the coverage area of a certain station. The Elon students have set up a blog about their experiences and you can read about it and see pictures they have taken at  www.wilmingtondtvtest.wordpress.com.

Now you may be asking what happened to the analog transmitters? For the next 25 days, the stations will be allowed to continue to operate their analog transmitters but only to provide a graphic that tells analog viewers their sets need to be upgraded and the programming is now available on their digital channels.

 

WWAY analog over the air on left TV. WWAY digital via cable on analog TV right.

After that, they will turn off their analog transmitters, but the FCC is allowing them to keep them ready to go back on the air if the area is threatened by a hurricane, but even this authorization will expire on February 17, 2009 along with the rest of us.

Speaking of the rest of us out side of Wilmington, we continue to count down until February 17, 2009 and get ready. We here at WGHP are awaiting equipment to convert our analog channel 8 transmitters to digital channel 8 transmitters. We want to go ahead and convert our auxiliary transmitter to digital as soon as possible so we can start testing it, but at this time, we have no idea when the equipment will arrive and we can begin the conversion. When that happens, I will keep you up to date on that.

On September 17 between 6 and 6:30pm, the North Carolina Association of Broadcasters are asking all stations in North Carolina to perform a "soft test" for digital. This is when we will break off the analog transmitter from the digital and for 60 seconds will broadcast a message that says if you are seeing this message, your TV needs to be upgraded to digital to help you identify if you are digital ready. Of course if you see that message and you are connected to cable or satellite, don't worry. You provider will do the conversion for you. This test is only for those with antennas connected to their TV's.

Also if you have a group that would like to have someone speak on the digital transition, give us a call here at the station and we will be happy to come speak!

Are you digital ready?

On Thursday August 21, it will be exactly 180 days until all full power television in the United States will be digital. That means 6 months left for TV stations and viewers alike to be ready.

For the people in Wilmington, they have less than 3 weeks, at noon on September 8th, before they loose full power analog TV. This is because the FCC was looking for a test market to see what would happen when a whole market turns off analog signals and Wilmington volunteered. So we will see what happens.

Wilmington, being small, only has 7 TV stations total. WWAY, the ABC affiliate, WECT, the NBC affiliate, WSFX, the FOX affiliate, and two low power stations, WILM, the CBS affiliate and W51CW broadcasting the Trinity Broadcasting Network will cease programming on their analog channels. The stations will be broadcasting a graphic on the analog channels for a month explaining that they have switched all their programming to digital and how it can be received. But since we are moving into main hurricane season, the FCC will allow those 6 stations participating in the test to restart analog programming if the coast is threatened by a hurricane this season. The state owned UNC PBS station for Wilmington, WUNJ, is not participating in the test, but will have to cease analog broadcasting by February 17, 2009 as the rest of the full power TV stations in the nation.

From what I have been told, people in Wilmington are for the most part ready for the analog shutdown, be it with digital converters for TVs not digital capable and new or upgrading current subscriptions to cable or satellite. The area has been "carpet bombed," as was described to me, by advertisements and announcements on and off air of the pending shutdown date. I have a cousin who lives in Wilmington who seems to know more about the transition than I do so I would say the people in Wilmington are as about ready as they are going to get. From media reports, those who aren't ready, have chosen to be.

The nation watches to see how this test goes.

Here in the Triad, we seem to be in mid stream of all the changes with everyone I come in contact with having knowledge of the transition on February 17. We get quite a few calls here at the station from people asking questions requesting information and if they already have their converters can they start using them now! (Well of course you can!!)  We also have been speaking to organizations on the transition and if you have a group that would be interested in hearing about the latest on the transition and what they need to do be ready, contact me here at the station and I will be happy to set up a date to come speak to you group.

Remember, 6 months to go! Are you ready?

On Monday August 4, at 7:15 pm I have been asked to speak on the digital television transition to the High Point Amateur Radio Club at Rosa Maes Cafe` near Bus 85 and National Highway south of High Point, Being a Ham Radio Operator myself, it gives me a chance to delve into the transition at a slightly deeper level but since many there will need the same information that everyone else needs, I can't go too deep. I spoke to this group about 6 years ago on the transition, but so many new people have come into the club and so much has changed since then, it will be like it was the first time. I hope to give a Power Point presentation and show some digital receivers and TV's to the group and hookup a small antenna to pick up what can be had there as a demo and the always popular, Q & A.

I suspect I will be repeating this again a few more times before the transition (and if you would like me to give a DTV presentation to your club or group, you can give me a call at the station and get on the list). If you have the time Monday evening, come on by! They eat at 6:30 and then have a short business meeting and the program (that's me!) starts atbout 7:15. I know they would be happy to have you and would be more than happy to talk about Ham Radio to you after I bloviate about DTV for a few minutes!

From the Useless Trivia bin, this past Thursday was 200 days until the big Digital Transition, the day that full power analog broadcasts end. Are you ready?

Every now and again I either get a call from a viewer or friends who ask me if this "digital television" they keep hearing about really works. Well of course it works! I see all the time at work! Of course that isn't what they mean. What they mean is can they watch TV in digital with an antenna from their house like they can with analog TV. There are so much information out there, and some of it isn't correct and even contradicts itself so what is the truth? All I can tell you is what I have personally observed from my own experiences in the last 6 years of having a digital tuner (well many anyway).

In late 2001 and early 2002, the major stations here began to sign on their digital transmitters at varying levels of coverage. No one was at full power except for PBS on Sauratown Mt who has a low power level to start with. Up until then some stations in Raleigh and Charlotte were on the air, but it didn't make much sense to go buy a $1200 digital tuner or a $6000 TV just to see if I could get those stations. So I waited until the local stations came on. By that time the price of tuners had dropped and I could actually watch something.

In those early days of local digital TV, not everyone was on 24 hours a day. WFMY was only on the air from 8:00 PM to 11:30 PM and when they actually broadcast something in HD. WXII signed on at 5:00 PM and signed off at 11:30 PM. Both were operating at half power. WXLV and WUPN (now WMYV) were on the air 24/7 but no HD and both operated at reduced power as well. We did operate 24/7 from the first day, but operated at 4200 watts of power, not the 1 million watts we run today. Even so, with the transmit antenna at 900 ft on our old tower at Randleman, I was able to pick up a viewable picture 99% of the time at my home in north Greensboro and we heard from many others around the area that did also. But there were many who couldn't because they were beyond our limited coverage area.

What that did show me was that this "digital TV' could do pretty well, even at low power. What it doesn't do is work 100% of the time with rabbit ears. Even after we increased power, more people with rabbit ears did pick us up, but in the digital world, rabbit ears should be avoided at all costs. Even a modest antenna placed on a deck or overhang will run circles around rabbit ears. My first antenna was a $50 UHF only antenna with 50 feet of RG-59 cable (not the stuff you want to be using) on a 10 ft pole roped to my back deck with no rotor and I picked up all the local stations, even low power WGHP from that humble little screen antenna. It doesn't take much antenna to pick up digital signals, but you have to at least try.

Now for those who have a noisy analog picture of a station, then yes, you may have trouble picking up the digital station counterpart, not because there is no signal, but there isn't enough signal for the digital receiver to lock to. Digital doesn't go quite as far as analog because of that, but it does work 95% of the coverage area. When we fire up the channel 8 digital transmitter on February 17, we will be looking to see how close the new digital signal will be in coverage to old analog signal.

Well one of the things I will miss.

I thought that the last year of analog TV transmissions I would be knee deep in something called TV DXing soaking in the last analog TV of the United States. But alas, I seem to either not have the time or desire or the band isn't open.

What is TV DXing you ask? For the nine out of ten who have no idea what that is, it is when one actively seeks TV signals beyond the normal reception range. Some people DX (which is a shorthand for DISTANCE) AM radio, some FM radio, some even shortwave wave and yes, some even DX TV. But you say, "You can't see TV signals beyond  60 or 70 miles. Are you crazy?" Crazy? Probably. But watching TV over 100 miles? DEFFINATELY DOABLE! "How?" "Laws of Physics my dear Watson."

Each frequency has a different physical length. They react with the atmosphere in different ways. That is why you can hear AM radio signals for thousands of miles away by night but have trouble picking up a station in the next town by day and where FM has a predictable seemingly never changing 24/7 coverage area. TV also. This is called "propagation." But that predictable 24/7 coverage  isn't always true. Things in the atmosphere are never unchanging.

AM radio signals are hundreds of feet long. FM and TV signals are from several feet to less than an inch in length. These react in the atmosphere differently. The reason AM stations can be heard at great distances at night and not during the day is due to the Sun and the D Layer of the atmosphere. If you remember from your high school science class, the atmosphere is broken up into different layers as you leave the surface of the Earth. As the wavelength shortens, they react on different parts of the atmosphere. In the D Layer, the Sun's radiation causes the molecules to spread far apart and allow the long AM waves to go into space. At night, with no Sun, the molecules clump together and whah lah! You hear WABC New York here in North Carolina.

The E Layer and with less effect, the F Layers (F1 and F2) react on FM and TV signals (but not AM signals) but they are very unpredictable when they will clump together enough to form what is call "sporatic electron clouds" that will reflect radio waves. The only sign that you MIGHT get a cloud forming is if the Sun is in an active sunspot event. The increased radiation from the Sun will cause the molecules to move closer together. TV channels 2 through 6 and the FM band will react on the clouds more often than the higher TV channels, several times a week in the summer. As you increase in frequency (and TV channels) the E and F Layers have less and less effect on the signals (only a few times a summer)  and a weather phenamena called "tropospheric ducting" or alternating warm and cold layers of air, as you have in the spring and fall, will also cause FM and TV signals to travel beyond the horizon. Tropo, as it is called, acts like someone has put an air conditioning duct in the sky between layers of warm and cold air. The radio waves get trapped in these layers and literally dump out like an AC register hundreds of miles away from the transmitter. These are mostly seen at VHF channels 7-13 and UHF channels. Get a day when it has been cool at night and hot during the day and you can almost bet you will see tropo and it doesn't take a special antenna setup to DX TV either.

Oh sure, you can put up a huge tower like Girard Westerberg of Lexington, Ky has here:

who by the way holds the current record for the fartherest digital TV station received when he picked up KOTA-DT channel 2 Rapid CIty, SD on 5/26/2004 at 8:40pm at a distance of 1,062 miles over E Layer skip! Here is his screencap to provide it:

He has a website devoted to DXing of all kinds, TV, DTV and FM at http://www.dxfm.com where he has pictures of all of his TV and DTV DXing!

Or the fabulous site of Jeff Kadet http://www.oldtvguides.com/DXPhotos in Illinios with THIS setup:

Of course you don't have to have a big antenna system to DX. Rabbit ears or regular old antennas on houses will work wonders. Just check out Mike Sittel's site http://www.mcsittel.com DXing done with a roof top antenna!

For those of you who wonder what a TV engineer uses for over the air TV reception? Check out my $50 UHF Channel Master 4338 mounted on top of a Jerrold VIP-307SR VHF antenna:

It does OK for what it is!

Now I just have to find the time to play with now before next February.

For all of the issues that we may have here in the Triad over the Digital Transition (and they are very few so far, thank goodness), many of the good people along the Front Range in Colorado have just started receiving over the air digital signals for the first time within the last week. "But how can that be?" you ask. Digital TV has been around for a while now.

It all started in 1998 when several of the Denver TV stations decided to build one tower to house their digital antennas on Lookout Mountain, where their separate analog antennas are located. A group of homeowners at the foot of the mountain decided that it wasn't safe or healthy to build this new tower. No matter that the top of Lookout Mountain has been home to radio and TV transmitters for better than 60 years while the homeowners are newcomers in the last 20 years or so. One of the homeowners, a lawyer, starts a NIMBY group called CARE (Canyon Area Residents for the Environment) and begins an 8 year battle against the TV stations and in effect, depriving residents of the surrounding area, free over the air digital TV because the stations can't build the new tower. 

The list of things that happened in those 8 years is just amazing. Everything from blackmailing the county commissioners with the threat of being voted out, and then when they couldn't find any legal justification to deny the tower going on a nasty campaign that got supporters on the county commissioners to "reexamine the case" and with false information to pull the approval, to getting court judges to side with them and not look at the law, to hiring "experts" on RF radiation and then coming up with some amazing "studies" that would scare the pants off of anyone who didn't know better and getting the town of Golden to attempt a non corporate limit annexation to condemn the property as "public lands" to keep the tower from being built. The whole time, the rest of the country was getting digital over the air free television, while the Denver area people waited, the only market in the nation to do so.

Over time, the usual environmental wackos that seem to populate Colorado and even the print media (no friends of the electronic media I can tell you) turned against the group, now publically dubbed  "sCARE" by most people in the area for all the "alarming health hazard data" the group had "dug up" for their arguments. Truth is, had ANY of that stuff been true, we ALL would be dead just because of cell phone RF radiation at our heads, never mind a broadcast tower on a mountain top that was thousands of feet above everyone's head. So in the end, what did it take to resolve the issue? The proverbial "Act of Congress." Literally.

On the last day that Congress was in session before the Christmas break of 2006, the Senators and Representatives of Colorado got both houses of Congress to pass a bill that stated anyone who had a valid permit from the FCC to build a TV transmitter facility on Lookout Mountain, could and local authorities could not stop it because of the "public good" clause in the law. I.E, federal trumps local and no judge was willing to try to overturn it. Of course CARE and their puppet governments of Jefferson County Commissioners and the town of Golden screamed bloody murder. This was a local matter and Congress had no legal authority to step into this. Of course, that wasn't correct. The digital transition is a federal mandate and the stations were doing what they were told to do and with time running out, the stations had to start construction if they wanted to make the February 17, 2009 date and not deprive Colorado citizens of free over the air television after the analog shutdown. Even Congress knew which side of their bread was buttered on with this issue. In an attempt to save face, CARE put on a dog and pony show to Washington saying how they were going to take the government back for the people by confronting the lawmakers, showing them how unfair they had been but they only got a cold shoulder from Washington. No one back home even cared.

Fastforward to April 11th of this year. The new tower comes alive when KCNC, KTVD, KUSA and KMGH all began full power digital broadcasting. Their respective old analog towers will be removed from the mountain when analog broadcasts cease February 17, 2009 removing 4 towers from the mountain with a net loss of 3 towers, making the mountain top less of an eye soar and reducing the RF radiation from the mountain.

As for CARE? The lawyer who started the group continues to fight on. CARE has now moved on to other mountain tops in the area to try and stop towers from being built on them to little avail or fanfare. Very sad actually. Concerned citizenry run amuck.

So it would seem no matter how bad things are in your own backyard, someone else has it a lot worse. We can be thankful. I guess?

If you are interested in this, check out http://www.hdtvcolorado.com the tower web page. It has pictures and links to past newspaper articles on the fight for the tower.