Keeping Seniors Connected

Many Off-Air viewers buying a converter box have problems receiving the same stations with the box installed as they did without it or get no broadcast stations at all (with converter boxes that don’t pass analogue signals).

There are many reasons why this happens:

1. They have an old antenna that has corroded over the years

2. They have the wrong antenna (VHF only) for UHF reception where most of the digital broadcast signals are and will be located

3. They may have received an acceptable analogue picture for years, but the broadcast station’s analogue signal was not that powerful in the first place producing a little snow or the old antenna is not powerful enough to receive and send a strong digital signal to the digital tuner in the converter box. Unlike analogue, no strong signal, no picture, just a blue screen

4. Many of the TV antenna designs now in use and on the market today such as the Yagi and rabbit ears have technology roots going back 30 years or more and may not work well with the digital chip sets in converter boxes.

5. The analogue signal passed through trees, but the digital signal passing through tress, especially through pine trees, won’t be strong enough to be decoded by the digital tuner.

6. Their antenna is aimed at the old analogue tower location and the digital towers have been relocated or it was aimed wrong all these years, but received a marginal analogue picture.

7. The digital stations may be broadcasting in low power until the transition.

8. They may be dealing with multi-path. Multi-path (bounced signals) is caused by buildings, hills and any other hard object in the line-of-sight to the broadcast towers.

9. They may have not performed the correct search procedure on their TV to find the digital stations. Many stations have changed channels, mostly to UHF (14-69)

10. The old incoming cable and/or connectors may be bad. These don’t last forever.

But TV reception starts with the right antenna.

Viewers should certainly try their old antenna first. It’s true that any of these older antennas will pick up some signals, maybe all the broadcast signals a viewer wants to receive, depending on their location. If they’re getting all the OTA channels they want and almost completely uncompressed DTV and HDTV, unlike cable or satellite, than they’re good to go.

Antennas can’t tell the difference between analog and digital signals, there are definitely certain models which have higher DTV batting averages than others. Not all antennas are equally suited for DTV. A percentage of viewers will require something a little more tailored for DTV reception.

OTA viewers can go to antennapoint.com to see quickly what stations are available to them, the distance, and compose heading to help in choosing and aiming their antenna. And if they decide to buy a newer antenna, they should buy it from a source that will completely refund their purchase price, no questions asked, if it doesn’t do the job.

antennaguy of MS 4:37PM August 01, 2008