The problem with collecting TV's...

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by dieseljeep

I still have to be hard-wired! I can't watch a picture that isn't almost perfect!

How could you stand TV before digital? By today's standards, NTSC analog signals looked terrible compared to DTV. Unless you were in a very strong signal area, the pictures you would receive from local TV stations were far, far from perfect; this was especially true if you were in a fringe area. I remember two situations in which my TV reception was so bad as to be practically unusable: the first was in 1965, when the PBS (then NET) television station in Cleveland signed on the air with a measly 1-megawatt ERP signal, which barely reached the area I was living in at the time (an eastern Cleveland suburb in which TV reception with indoor antennas was not that great); the situation would not change for the better until years later, when the station put in a stronger transmitter, the concern that owned the station put in translators (neither of which I could get at my home at the time), and when my area finally got cable in the early 1980s. The second instance was twenty years later, when a new UHF station signed on in suburban Cleveland on channel 19. The station had a 3-megawatt-plus ERP analog signal at the time, but lightning hit their tower after being on the air just six months. The station was never the same after that, although in many ways, since DTV, the reception is worse, especially in far-suburban and fringe areas, since the station now has a 9.5-kW ERP DTV signal on channel 10. The station's owners stubbornly refuse to put its signal on a UHF channel or to put up a translator for the east lakeshore area (which would improve the coverage area 100 percent or more), but that's another story.

DTV is much better; however, the drawback is you must have a very strong signal, or else you don't get a picture at all. I don't know what your definition of an "almost perfect" DTV picture is, but in digital TV there is no such thing; again, with DTV, the picture either is there or it is not. I am purposely ignoring the case of DTV signals that appear pixelated or otherwise unwatchable (I get this every so often with my own setup, which receives video streams over the Internet, not RF signals; I gave up on OTA DTV over a year ago, since I live in an area that does not get two important Cleveland TV stations without cable, satellite or streaming video, although the other stations come in just fine, using just an indoor antenna).