Quote:
Originally Posted by benman94
Why is reception of ATSC on VHF, especially low-VHF, such an enormous pain in the ass compared to ATSC on UHF? In the analog days, my grandparents, who live in something of a fringe area, had a hell of a time picking up some of the NTSC UHF stations. Now with ASTC, the situation seems to be reversed, with any station on UHF coming in just fine and the handful of VHF stations in the Detroit and Flint/MBS markets being nearly impossible to receive.
More importantly, why the hell would the FCC approve a standard that doesn't work very well on VHF? In a place like Michigan, VHF stations were a must in getting adequate coverage of our geographically large markets.
Take for instance the upper lower peninsula and eastern upper peninsula of Michigan. Traverse City, Cadillac, Sault Ste. Marie, St. Ignace, Cheboygan, and Petoskey all rely on Traverse City stations (with full power translators between the Soo and the Straits filling in the gaps). Providing a quality signal to that vast area was feasible with VHF, it's near impossible to do with UHF. The local stations have resorted to sharing sub-channels to try and make up for the inadequate coverage. Still, if I lived in St. Ignace, I'd be pissed that FOX is only available in standard def on a subchannel of another station...
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Ben, I live in a semi-fringe area 30+ miles from all seven Cleveland television stations' towers, and do not receive two of them OTA. The problem is that the two stations I cannot get are on VHF DTV channels, while the others, every one of them, are on UHF DTV assignments. The only way anyone in this area can get channels 8 and 19 (FOX and CBS from Cleveland) is to have cable, satellite or a streaming video player such as Roku. I am using a Roku player and now get reception from every Cleveland TV station, including the two I do not receive OTA. I will probably use this system indefinitely, doing away with OTA television antennas altogether. I no longer use the cable connection, but I must still have a cable account so the Spectrum (formerly Time Warner Cable) TV application used with my Roku will receive local TV channels.
Low-power or full-power translators would solve, once and for all, the reception problems channels 8 and 19 (on VHF DTV channels 8 and ten, respectively) have in the area east of Cleveland along the south shore of Lake Erie, where I live, but the stations' owners flatly refuse to install such translators, probably for financial reasons. (Channel 8 did have a translator on channel 31 which it installed shortly after the start of the DTV transition, but it has since been deactivated.) The transmitter for one of Cleveland's UHF stations, along with its RF spectrum, were sold recently, the plan being to eventually put the station in question on a subchannel of CBS channel 19. I don't know if this has been done yet, as I no longer have cable (Spectrum cable in my area has been 100 percent digital since the third of this month) and the "MyTV" subchannel showing on the channel guide for my Roku player only receives a channel it refers to as "CLE 43".
BTW, if I could no longer receive FOX channel 8 in my area it would be no loss whatsoever to me, as I don't watch the OTA main channel. However, I do watch the Antenna TV subchannel on channel 8.2, although it irks me that the subchannel carries endless (or so it seems) strings of commercials promoting channel 8, as I do not care beans for that channel ever since FOX Broadcasting bought it out and switched it from CBS to FOX some time in the '90s. CBS was moved to a UHF station (channel 19) which, despite their 3.7-megawatt NTSC (now 9.5 kW ATSC) signal, does not reach much of the greater Cleveland area OTA, particularly the region east of the city along the lakeshore.
When TV was converted to ATSC from NTSC, the FCC should have, IMO, outlawed the use of VHF channels for DTV and reassigned the entire VHF TV band to some other service such as police, fire, etc. that really needs the spectrum space.
Sheeesh!