Future of ATSC for DTV in USA?

In article ,
Daniel W. Rouse Jr. wrote:

Oh, and I won't invest in satellite because of the
occasional screens showing renegotation with the satellite provider.

What is that? I've had satellite for nearly 15 years and I don't
recall any screen saying "renegotiating with satellite provider."

Do you mean the screen when the receiver has to reacquire the signal
during a heavy rainstorm? That isn't "renegotiation with the satellite
provider"; it's just waiting for the signal from the dish on my house
to come back again. Nothing to do with anything that the satellite
company is doing. That doesn't even happen very often. And I don't just
mean in my weather-friendly area; I mean that I rarely see such problems
mentioned even by people who get serious thunderstorms every year.


I don't care if you are tired of my "whining". 8VSB modulation based ATSC
OTA is very poor quality when reception is not optimal

Well, duh. But how is it making your life better to complain about
it year after year after year? Can anyone on this newsgroup fix your
reception situation? No. Can anyone on this newsgroup devise a magical
digital signal that degrades like an analog signal? No. Is this really
how you want to spend your life, complaining about something that isn't
going to change?


Patty

"Patty Winter" wrote in message
...

In article ,
Daniel W. Rouse Jr. wrote:

Oh, and I won't invest in satellite because of the
occasional screens showing renegotation with the satellite provider.

What is that? I've had satellite for nearly 15 years and I don't
recall any screen saying "renegotiating with satellite provider."

I stayed at one hotel that had satellite. Around 2am or so, the signal kept
cutting out and a screen appeared showing the signal was renegotiating. Or
whatever the exact wording was, I just noted satellite was dropping out
similar to how OTA DTV dropped out. I wrote off satellite.

Do you mean the screen when the receiver has to reacquire the signal
during a heavy rainstorm? That isn't "renegotiation with the satellite
provider"; it's just waiting for the signal from the dish on my house
to come back again. Nothing to do with anything that the satellite
company is doing. That doesn't even happen very often. And I don't just
mean in my weather-friendly area; I mean that I rarely see such problems
mentioned even by people who get serious thunderstorms every year.

The weather was clear at the hotel I was staying at.


I don't care if you are tired of my "whining". 8VSB modulation based ATSC
OTA is very poor quality when reception is not optimal

Well, duh. But how is it making your life better to complain about
it year after year after year? Can anyone on this newsgroup fix your
reception situation? No. Can anyone on this newsgroup devise a magical
digital signal that degrades like an analog signal? No. Is this really
how you want to spend your life, complaining about something that isn't
going to change?


You might have noticed Usenet is a discussion forum, right? That's what
people do, discuss. I haven't had any serious personal attacks, so it hasn't
been necessary to get into a serious flamewar.

You might have noticed a post once or twice per day here, more if a
discussion has active responses, I guarantee I have other things better in
my life than Usenet, but I reserve the right to read and respond to whatever
discussion I want to. Wait until the election results are done, gasp, I
might even be in a politics newsgroup too.

Let me also offer this--maybe there is someone else out there with similar
reception issues. Maybe they only lurk. Maybe my posts don't offer
solutions, but if they choose to go to cable (analog or digital) rather than
fight with OTA's design flaws and deficiencies, it's trivial for me to brain
dump my own OTA DTV experience.

Finally, if any of the engineers responsible for designing, implementing,
testing, and releasing the current form of 8VSB modulation based ATSC OTA is
reading, maybe they'll think twice when ATSC 3.0 (they are now skipping 2.0)
is implemented, and they'll try their absolute hardest to make it work with
the same antennas as were used with analog NTSC. I've described my
unsatisfactory user experience in sufficient detail, more than once as
needed when a discussion as to how well ATSC actually works comes up. Now
I'll even offer that they can contact me, I'll let them use my apartment as
a test site. The ground rule is that if the antenna worked with analog NTSC,
it had better damn well not fail with ATSC 3.0 or whatever they do with the
next version--that is non-negotiable and if they can't do that, their
technology flat out sucks. I have nine antennas they can choose to work
with, I'll offer the best one that worked in both rooms for analog NTSC was
the TERK TV-5, and I still have those antennas in the boxes. But I figure
that more than likely, they'll continue with their limited testing and just
extrapolating signal levels as they did for original ATSC.

You don't happen to remember that the GuvMint gave out vouchers that
discounted ANY converter by a certain amount of dollars when the changeover
began, so that brand-new analog TeeVee you just bought didn't become junk
instantly?

Not the way I remember it. I remember the U.S. government laying down
rules for the features that were *required* in a coupon-eligible box,
those that would be *allowable*, and another list that would render a
box that included them ineligible. The idea, I assume, was to make the
boxes functional in a basic sense, but not so good that they would hurt
sales of new digital TVs.

As I recall there were several limits on the coupon-eligible
converter boxes, a few of which were annoying:

(1) Very limited front-panel display capability, including no
display of the current channel. Mine have only two indicators
(or one multi-color indicator) that can indicate on vs. off (or
"standby") vs. no power.
(2) no HDMI, VGA, RGB, DVI, component, USB video, Firewire video
or Wi-Fi output. That pretty much leaves composite (required),
S-Video (optional), and modulated RF NTSC (required).
(3) No output format better than 480i. Or maybe 480p.
(4) No DVR functionality
(5) It must not double as a digital cable or satellite set-top box.

On Tue, 06 Nov 2012 09:08:50 -0800, Daniel W. Rouse Jr. wrote:

I don't care if you are tired of my "whining". 8VSB modulation based
ATSC OTA is very poor quality when reception is not optimal, and unlike
Bob Miller, I'm not going to get run out of this newsgroup. That guy was
right, you know, about 8VSB being crap--I read his posts.

I thought you were Bob. You talk out your *ss just like he did. BM had a
vested interest in cofdm. The problem with cofdm is that it worked well
under certain conditions and not so good otherwise. 8VSB works better
under all the conditions in the US.

Oh, and I have analog cable now--getting OTA is no longer a priority
anymore, but I will be here to tell how crappy United States ATSC OTA is
for every post that says it works well. Don't like it? Block me/killfile
me and be done. I am not going through any engineering exercises trying
different antennas, different converter boxes, etc. ATSC either works
with the antennas I have, or it doesn't, and as I have proven, it
doesn't--not for more than 2 hours in most cases and rarely on one
channel, for four hours. That's pathetic. That's not advanced TV.

You not being able to get it to work for you shows there's more
inadequate than just the antennas you used. Enjoy your crappy SD analog
cable.

But the masses, the proles--those who think the gummint is obligated to
give them everything--think that every converter box is by definition a
"coupon enabled converter box". That's how they were trained to think
of converter boxes by Uncle Sugar and his handout team.

They don't know that you could buy converter boxes that weren't handouts.

At the time, I looked for better boxes (and I had already purchased
and worn out (power supply died on one of them) a couple of boxes
before they came up with the coupon program). I would have considered
spending maybe $250 for a good one. The coupon program sort of
drove the better boxes off the market. I couldn't find any better
ones at *any* price.

"Wes Newell" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 06 Nov 2012 09:08:50 -0800, Daniel W. Rouse Jr. wrote:

I don't care if you are tired of my "whining". 8VSB modulation based
ATSC OTA is very poor quality when reception is not optimal, and unlike
Bob Miller, I'm not going to get run out of this newsgroup. That guy was
right, you know, about 8VSB being crap--I read his posts.

I thought you were Bob. You talk out your *ss just like he did. BM had a
vested interest in cofdm. The problem with cofdm is that it worked well
under certain conditions and not so good otherwise. 8VSB works better
under all the conditions in the US.

Well, I'm not Bob.

Oh, and I have analog cable now--getting OTA is no longer a priority
anymore, but I will be here to tell how crappy United States ATSC OTA is
for every post that says it works well. Don't like it? Block me/killfile
me and be done. I am not going through any engineering exercises trying
different antennas, different converter boxes, etc. ATSC either works
with the antennas I have, or it doesn't, and as I have proven, it
doesn't--not for more than 2 hours in most cases and rarely on one
channel, for four hours. That's pathetic. That's not advanced TV.

You not being able to get it to work for you shows there's more
inadequate than just the antennas you used. Enjoy your crappy SD analog
cable.

I'll take "crappy SD analog cable" over the unsatisfactory results of 8VSB
modulation based OTA ATSC: picture and sound, (audio dropout), picture and
sound (frame drops, audio dropouts), picture and sound, (frozen frame),
(smearing frame), (eventually a black screen with a No Signal message)--as I
readjust the antenna with a laggy signal meter each time the reception craps
out. Intermittent picture and sound followed by data loss symptom crap is
certainly more "crap" and far from "advanced" TV, that's for sure.

Guess what? I even get occasional slight moving vertical noise lines on
cable channel 6--with the rest of the picture otherwise clear--and the
picture is still an order of magnitude watchable than when ATSC reception
craps out time and time again. Those noise lines are not even something
worth having the cable company over to adjust, since I rarely if ever watch
programming cable channel 6 these days. More importantly, I get 2 through 5
and 7 through 22 absolutely clear as can be, with the only digital glitches
coming from the broadcast side. Oh, and analog cable also preserves surround
sound so--combined with an AV Receiver running in Dolby Pro Logic II Movie
mode (or any other receiver DSP surround mode but I prefer to use Dolby Pro
Logic II Movie mode)--I can get 5.1 surround sound for any cable TV program
that is matrix encoded in surround sound. Want to get even more technical?
It's actually 5.0 surround sound with the receiver routing sounds below the
crossover point (e.g., 80 Hz) to the subwoofer, there isn't a dedicated
subwoofer/LFE channel coming from the analog cable TV program. But even that
isn't new, since I even got surround sound with NTSC analog OTA.

So what if they took away KTLA 5 (cable channel 14) from the cable system?
Well, I hardly watched LA news and most of the other "Channel 5" programming
was also on cable channel 5, just at different times of the day. Therefore,
"Crappy SD analog cable" is more than good enough for me over total picture
and sound failure when ATSC reception goes defective.

Enjoy your well-working ATSC OTA reception, but don't even think my test
results are invalid because they are not. My antennas didn't break, their
technology broke and they failed to fix it adequately enough for me to get 8
hours continuous reception without a single audio dropout or video frame
issue.

"Gordon Burditt" wrote in message
rica...
But the masses, the proles--those who think the gummint is obligated to
give them everything--think that every converter box is by definition a
"coupon enabled converter box". That's how they were trained to think
of converter boxes by Uncle Sugar and his handout team.

They don't know that you could buy converter boxes that weren't handouts.

At the time, I looked for better boxes (and I had already purchased
and worn out (power supply died on one of them) a couple of boxes
before they came up with the coupon program). I would have considered
spending maybe $250 for a good one. The coupon program sort of
drove the better boxes off the market. I couldn't find any better
ones at *any* price.

I did see a set top box in a Circuit City that was a Samsung branded box and
it also had component video output. But then Circuit City eventually went
out of business.

However, the coupon eligible converter boxes--at least the Zenith DTT-900
and Digital Stream DTX9950 ones that I purchased--had some sort of sign near
the stack of converter boxes or a sticker on the converter box clearly
indicating they were coupon eligible boxes. Both of those boxes I have (now
in their storage boxes) had:

* Coaxial Antenna In
* Coaxial Video Out
* Composite Video Out (yellow)
* Audio Out L/R (white/red)
* Channel 3/4 (for use with coaxial video out)

....and my tests showed that--when OTA reception was working, the audio out
did preserve the matrixed surround sound in the program that was matrix
encoded for surround sound.

In fact, while I used the two coupons I was allotted for the two Zenith
DTT-900 boxes at a Circuit City, I paid full list price for the Digital
Stream DTX9950 boxes at a Radio Shack that stocked those boxes.

These days, they still have some of the cheap converter boxes on the shelf
of some stores, but it also looks like there is little to no interest in
buying those.

On 11/07/2012 01:37 AM, Gordon Burditt wrote:
You don't happen to remember that the GuvMint gave out vouchers that
discounted ANY converter by a certain amount of dollars when the changeover
began, so that brand-new analog TeeVee you just bought didn't become junk
instantly?

Not the way I remember it. I remember the U.S. government laying down
rules for the features that were *required* in a coupon-eligible box,
those that would be *allowable*, and another list that would render a
box that included them ineligible. The idea, I assume, was to make the
boxes functional in a basic sense, but not so good that they would hurt
sales of new digital TVs.

As I recall there were several limits on the coupon-eligible
converter boxes, a few of which were annoying:

(1) Very limited front-panel display capability, including no
display of the current channel. Mine have only two indicators
(or one multi-color indicator) that can indicate on vs. off (or
"standby") vs. no power.
(2) no HDMI, VGA, RGB, DVI, component, USB video, Firewire video
or Wi-Fi output. That pretty much leaves composite (required),
S-Video (optional), and modulated RF NTSC (required).
(3) No output format better than 480i. Or maybe 480p.
(4) No DVR functionality
(5) It must not double as a digital cable or satellite set-top box.

Programmable delay timers were allowed, but I know of only two brands
that had them - DTVPal and Zinwell. Both had firmware that was, um, less
than perfect. Firmware upgrading was supposed to be possible, but of
course no upgrades were offered.

I have two Zinwells. Their quirks are annoying, but they can be worked
around and are far less annoying than trying to get an analog VCR to
work without one.

TJ

On 11/7/12 2:47 PM, in article , "TJ"
wrote:

On 11/07/2012 01:37 AM, Gordon Burditt wrote:
You don't happen to remember that the GuvMint gave out vouchers that
discounted ANY converter by a certain amount of dollars when the changeover
began, so that brand-new analog TeeVee you just bought didn't become junk
instantly?

Not the way I remember it. I remember the U.S. government laying down
rules for the features that were *required* in a coupon-eligible box,
those that would be *allowable*, and another list that would render a
box that included them ineligible. The idea, I assume, was to make the
boxes functional in a basic sense, but not so good that they would hurt
sales of new digital TVs.

As I recall there were several limits on the coupon-eligible
converter boxes, a few of which were annoying:

(1) Very limited front-panel display capability, including no
display of the current channel. Mine have only two indicators
(or one multi-color indicator) that can indicate on vs. off (or
"standby") vs. no power.
(2) no HDMI, VGA, RGB, DVI, component, USB video, Firewire video
or Wi-Fi output. That pretty much leaves composite (required),
S-Video (optional), and modulated RF NTSC (required).
(3) No output format better than 480i. Or maybe 480p.
(4) No DVR functionality
(5) It must not double as a digital cable or satellite set-top box.

Programmable delay timers were allowed, but I know of only two brands
that had them - DTVPal and Zinwell. Both had firmware that was, um, less
than perfect. Firmware upgrading was supposed to be possible, but of
course no upgrades were offered.

I have two Zinwells. Their quirks are annoying, but they can be worked
around and are far less annoying than trying to get an analog VCR to
work without one.

TJ

Anyone remember ReplayTV?!?

On 11/6/2012 11:19 PM PT, Daniel W. Rouse Jr. typed:
However, the coupon eligible converter boxes--at least the Zenith
DTT-900 and Digital Stream DTX9950 ones that I purchased--had some sort
of sign near the stack of converter boxes or a sticker on the converter
box clearly indicating they were coupon eligible boxes. Both of those
boxes I have (now in their storage boxes) had:

* Coaxial Antenna In
* Coaxial Video Out
* Composite Video Out (yellow)
* Audio Out L/R (white/red)
* Channel 3/4 (for use with coaxial video out)

...and my tests showed that--when OTA reception was working, the audio
out did preserve the matrixed surround sound in the program that was
matrix encoded for surround sound.

In fact, while I used the two coupons I was allotted for the two Zenith
DTT-900 boxes at a Circuit City, I paid full list price for the Digital
Stream DTX9950 boxes at a Radio Shack that stocked those boxes.

These days, they still have some of the cheap converter boxes on the
shelf of some stores, but it also looks like there is little to no
interest in buying those.

My parents still have and use Zenith DTT-900 boxes for their old CRT TVs
from Circuit City with the coupons. They still work well. Even one was
dropped onto a hard floor by accident and still works! They're very good
converter boxes. I remember reading on the web sites, forums, and maybe
on the newsgroups in here about raved comments/reviews.

Too bad DTV Pal DVR (I still use it today) wasn't coupon eligible. I did
have a DTV Pal (non-DVR), but it sucked (very buggy and freezes/crashes
a lot -- everyone has this problem).

I assume digital to analog OTA converter boxes are not popular today
because many people just get a HDTV that don't need them today. I wonder
what's the statistics of people still using non-digital TVs and using
converter boxes these days. Does anyone know?
--
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on their silly little Sundays?" --Antoine de saint-Exupéry, 'Wind, Sand,
and Stars,' 1939
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