RE: [VAL] TV Antennas and the future of TV

["David Tidmore" <dtidmore@xxxxxxx>]

Forrest,
That could be the problem.  Randy did mention that he was an early adopter,
so his tuner may not be the best at handling multipath.  The fact that he is
currently depending on signals bounced off a water tower could also be part
of the problem.  Bounced signals can work, but they are typically weaker,
and they may have more multipath interference than even a direct line of
sight signal.  If my memory serves me correct, Denver has all its TV
transmission towers up near Golden.  Is Randy located such that he can't get
a clear line of sight to those towers?  Another thing to know is that many
broadcasters are STILL not operating their ATSC transmitters at full power.
They whine about the cost of electricity and that no one is watching anyway
(they have pretty much dropped this line over the last year though).  The
FCC has not taken kindly to this practice as low power status was intended
for testing and initial calibration, not actual operation, and has mandated
that the DTV transmitters be run a full legally authorized power.  Can't
remember the deadline for full power as mandate, but I can look it up if
anyone is interested. If Randy has a combination of an older designed ATSC
tuner plus depending on signals bounced off a water tower, then he has a
good recipe for poor ATSC reception. It is not so much a matter of the
antenna as it is the quality of the signal arriving at the antenna. In NYC,
as part of a proof of concept, apartment dwellers were given basically
nothing more than rabbit-ear antennas along along with ATSC tuners and found
that they had no more and in many cases less problems with ATSC signals than
they did with NTSC.  But the fact remains, that if there is a lot of
multipath interference and you can't go with highly directional antennas,
then you better have a fairly recent ATSC tuner.

David