[Cialug] [OT] Digital TV

[murraymckee at wellsfargo.com]

We live between South Ridge Mall and Indianola.  We have a good antenna, intended to be roof mounted, hanging in out attic.  A rough description would be it looks like a fish skeleton with an alligator jaw on it.  We bought a converter box with a coupon and got OK readings.  40s and 50s.  We're told now that they should have been much higher, considering we're on a hilltop and have a direct line of sight to the towers.

I took the antenna down and we had spray on expanding foam insulation applied to the inside of our attic roof and the end walls of the attic.

I put the antenna back up about 8 hours after I took it down and the TV reception went to pot, both analog and digital.  Channel 13 is in the 30s and the rest are from 10 to 20, and below 10 or so the signal drops out and can't be decoded.  I've replaced the coax from the antenna to the TV.

Everyone is telling us that the insulation shouldn't have made any difference and nobody can tell us why it did.  If anybody has any clues I'd be glad to have help figuring this out.

There is a 4 way splitter in the living room with one line going to each of the two DTV boxes, one to the VCR, and one to the TV.  Each of the DTV boxes connects to the VCR with the 3 cable method, left and right audio and video, plugging into Line In 1 and 2 on the VCR.  Line Out from the VCR goes to the TV with another triad of wires.  That way I can record up to two channels without having to reset the DTV boxes.  There doesn't seem to be any way to get the VCR to change the channel on the DTV box, nor power it off and on, but that's another issue.

13 is the only digital channel we can receive well enough to be satisfactory.  The others are bad to worse.

I'm figuring I'll have to move the antenna to the roof.  How does one ground the antenna so that lightening doesn't get transferred to the DTV box / VCR / TV etc.?


Murray McKee
Operating Systems Engineer
WFFIS - Wells Fargo Financial Information Systems
800 Walnut Street
MAC F4030-037
Des Moines, IA 50309-3605
WORK (515)557-6127 Cell (NEW) (515) 343-6630  FAX (515) 557-6046
MurrayMcKee at WellsFargo.com
"This message may contain confidential and / or privileged information.  If you are not the addressee or authorized to receive this for the addressee, you must not use, copy, disclose, or take any action based on this message or any information herein.  If you have received this message in error, please advise the sender immediately by reply e-mail and delete this message.  Thank you for your cooperation."

________________________________
From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On Behalf Of Jerry Heiselman
Sent: Sunday, May 03, 2009 8:54 AM
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
Subject: Re: [Cialug] [OT] Digital TV

I first bought a digital antenna from Best Buy (http://www.amazon.com/Terk-Low-Profile-Indoor-Antenna-TV5/dp/B000069106).  I got around 70-80% signal strength.  It seemed okay, but it would cut out very frequently.  Then I watched a segment on Make: Television about building your own (http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/01/maker_workshop_pdf_dtv_antenna.html).  With this new antenna mounted in my attic, I now get 90-100% signal strength except for Fox which comes in around 85.  I also put the antenna feed into a splitter/combiner and combined it with the cable from the Mediacom feed (I am not a subscriber, but the feed is still attached to the signal tap outside my house).  This then feeds into my TV.  This seems to have seriously stabilized the signal.

http://www.antennaweb.org is a great resources for helping you decide on a type of antenna and how to point a directional antenna.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://cialug.org/pipermail/cialug/attachments/20090504/3edf36c4/attachment.htm