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adventures with a cheap DTV box

Posted by tunenut on June 1, 2008 at 17:47:51:
Got my coupon from the government when I was out of town. Got a Zenith box today from Circuit City, seemed as good as any. It cost $25 including tax, after the coupon.

So I started playing today. My antenna is a VHF rabbit ears with a UHF flat panel in between. I keep in on the 2nd floor and run a line down to the 1st floor. That has worked OK, reception ranges from excellent to poor, depending on the station.

The box first does an automatic cycle to detect stations. This was kind of exciting, because there were over 20 stations.

However, the rub was that some of the important ones were not picked up. While I had Spanish soccer and infomercials on UHF, I did not have ABC or PBS. Back to the drawing board.

I tried manually adding these important stations. This was partially successful. Then I decided to start from scratch. I chose the exact list of stations that I was interested in, looked them up, and added only those. I deleted all the others for now. Then I worked on trying to pick up the 9 stations that I really want (in analog, 7 of these are VHF, 2 are UHF).

I am practiced at tweaking antennas, and eventually I got 8 of the 9 coming in pretty well. This was a proof of concept for now...after the digital conversion, the actual channels will change location anyway, so there's no great utility to dialing it all in today.

The most annoying thing about the digital picture is the variable aspect ratio. In some cases, the traditional 4:3 picture filled up my traditional 4:3 screen and looked fine. In other cases, a smaller 4:3 box was placed inside black bars, effectively lowering the size of my picture. There were a number of channels which required me to switch my TV to 16:9 (a button on my remote)- then these would either be letter boxed or again boxed both horizontally and vertically.

There is no snow, however, a weak signal pixellates, then drops out completely. This is worse than snow.

In general, it's not great, but it appears to be workable.