If analog was rough... I can't imagine digital will be better. Digital looks awesome, but the drop off to unusable signal is shorter. It sounds like you would need a serious antenna setup, including it being high up, to have a shot.
"Locals only" possible, where no OTA reception?
- Thread starter Seamonsters
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Take a look at this site and plug in your address and zipcode and it will tell you what you can receive from your address.
www.antennaweb.org
If it is yellow for your station, you can get reception with a small multi directional antenna.
If it red for your station, you would need a Medium directional antenna.
If it green for you station, you would need a Medium Multi directional antenna.
If it is Lt. green for your station, you would need a Large multi directional antenna.
If it is blue for your station, you would need a Medium Directional antenna With a Pre amp.
If it Violet for your station, you would need a Large Directional antenna with a Pre amp.
ATSC 3.0 does better with multipath issues but it does not have any longer range.
Multipath appears as interference between OFDM symbols; ATSC 3.0 handles multipath by inserting a guard interval between symbols. The guard interval (GI) is created in the time domain by taking samples belonging to the last part of the OFDM symbol and prepending them as a cyclic prefix to the original symbol.
Thanks. I’ve now checked multiple reception-strength websites, including that one, and they’re all no go for my location. That particular site shows no stations, in any color. Evidently digital is scarcely better than analog.
No surprise, really. The vast majority of broadcast sources w/in ~100 miles are at Mt. Wilson, ~40 miles away. Directly between it and me is much of the *length* of the Santa Monica Mountains — more than half the distance to the towers — and I am down low beyond those mountains.
so I’m back to sorting out my options with a limited Dish package or possibly Sling. (I haven’t yet called Dish because I have a lot of notes to get organized beforehand, and haven’t had the time for that.)
What? Could you explain this IP rights TiVo as on DVR equipment for all TV providers. AFAIK, TiVo settled with Dish and gave Dish lifetime rights on DVR and more IP tech, and TiVo lost their case with Comcast regarding its DVR patents. Has that changed? Or are you referring to TiVo's EPG IP? But, I do not recall any such case that they require all TV providers to pay them for anything.
In fact, that is why TiVo is still going downhill financially; TiVo was not successful in getting everyone they sued to pay for them for the life of TiVo patents. They only got fairly modest settlements of cash payments (far less than if the MVPD's and DVR makers had to pay fees for the life of TiVo patents) because the trials necessary to prove the remaining MVPD's and DVR makers were infringing on their rights would have taken too long and be too costly, so TiVo was forced to settle with Dish (TiVo's first lawsuit on the matter of Time-Warp and another patent to spook everyone else into either doing business with TiVo or settle) because TiVo was drowning in legal fees for something like 5+ years and was nearly out of money to stay in business, and according to Tom Rogers (then CEO of TiVo):
" I don't want to wait [to take the Circuit Court's ruling that was a huge set-back for TiVo and the Texas judge who was admonished for his ruling regarding Echostar's "work-around"] for the Supreme Court [to settle the matter]".
But all that was many, many, many years ago. All that money has been paid to TiVo a LONG time ago by all the parties who decided to settle and save years long legal fees.
Anyway, I am always eager to learn what I do not know, so please fill me in. Thanks.
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And IP is the real strength of ATSC 3.0 with all its "baked-in" benifits. In fact, that makes converting ASTC 3.0 to function with an older ATSC 2.0 tuner a fairly trivial matter. TiVo demoed a nice such device that used an extremely compact USB converter.
I have not looked lately, but I had several times in the past, and I clearly remember that my FIRST "receiver"--ONE of my two H3's--was NEVER charged a "receiver" or "outlet" fee, but was always charged the DVR fee. All the clients and my 2nd H3 were all charged the "receiver" or "outlet" fee. All that was consistant with Dish policies regarding the "First Receiver" not being charged a receiver fee, wheather it was a DVR or non-DVR box. Has this changed?
Hey, OP, you don't have to be too specific, but could you give us a general area/section of SoCal you are located?
The problem in our (LA) area is not distance (the height of Mt. Wilson and Mt. Harvard provide for STRONG reception and excellent coverage in areas without obstruction/terrain even at pretty fair distances--and your 30+ miles distance from the station towers that have the best/most desired content is not the problem), but the fact that there are countless communities built INTO the hills and deep into canyons and these hills and that hills just a few miles apart and those mountains and that mountain and often with the hills and mountains looming right over our heads.
The question for your situation is how far away are you from the obstruction (I take that to mean the hillside, etc.) If you are sufficiently far away, than two things can help: HEIGHT, and some power, but mostly HEIGHT. I just don't know your situation, and if even particular placement can help.
I can tell you I know of some house holds here that have no hope of ever getting any signal from OTA because, like my dear aunt and uncle, they live right next to that steep hill side or mountain--a whole lot of people do, and no amount of high power OTA antenna is of any help. And there are countless shadows cast by countless terrain here in places I would never expect it.
My situation is that I am not all that close to the First Effect obstacle terrain, but it is a ROYAL PAIN to deal with. my OTA must be placed at sufficient height, and most assiduously pointed in just the right direction to take advantage of the LOWER parts of the contour of the hills a few miles away that is the SWEET SPOT for almost everything at Mt. Wilson and just down the road (both in location and elevation) Mt. Harvard, and I still get some channels with low signal reception, but they can be stable the vast majority of the time. You would think things are flat in my area with no visible terrain, but, in fact, it is a gentle slope right into the unseen, but looming hills. I can tell you going just a few blocks north of my location, the even further slope makes getting OTA near to completely impossible. We are surrounded by terrain in the entire metro area. aside from a few places that will suffer from liquefaction in the coming big quakes. Those places a flat, but they are gonna sink
.
Let us know how this all pans out. And go ahead and try some of the antenna gain suggestions others have offered and see for yourself it works. Otherwise, sadly the Slingbox product will soon be shut down by Echostar/Dish. Perhaps Dish Anywhere from someone else's home might work to watch OTA at your home.
The problem in our (LA) area is not distance (the height of Mt. Wilson and Mt. Harvard provide for STRONG reception and excellent coverage in areas without obstruction/terrain even at pretty fair distances--and your 30+ miles distance from the station towers that have the best/most desired content is not the problem), but the fact that there are countless communities built INTO the hills and deep into canyons and these hills and that hills just a few miles apart and those mountains and that mountain and often with the hills and mountains looming right over our heads.
The question for your situation is how far away are you from the obstruction (I take that to mean the hillside, etc.) If you are sufficiently far away, than two things can help: HEIGHT, and some power, but mostly HEIGHT. I just don't know your situation, and if even particular placement can help.
I can tell you I know of some house holds here that have no hope of ever getting any signal from OTA because, like my dear aunt and uncle, they live right next to that steep hill side or mountain--a whole lot of people do, and no amount of high power OTA antenna is of any help. And there are countless shadows cast by countless terrain here in places I would never expect it.
My situation is that I am not all that close to the First Effect obstacle terrain, but it is a ROYAL PAIN to deal with. my OTA must be placed at sufficient height, and most assiduously pointed in just the right direction to take advantage of the LOWER parts of the contour of the hills a few miles away that is the SWEET SPOT for almost everything at Mt. Wilson and just down the road (both in location and elevation) Mt. Harvard, and I still get some channels with low signal reception, but they can be stable the vast majority of the time. You would think things are flat in my area with no visible terrain, but, in fact, it is a gentle slope right into the unseen, but looming hills. I can tell you going just a few blocks north of my location, the even further slope makes getting OTA near to completely impossible. We are surrounded by terrain in the entire metro area. aside from a few places that will suffer from liquefaction in the coming big quakes. Those places a flat, but they are gonna sink
.Let us know how this all pans out. And go ahead and try some of the antenna gain suggestions others have offered and see for yourself it works. Otherwise, sadly the Slingbox product will soon be shut down by Echostar/Dish. Perhaps Dish Anywhere from someone else's home might work to watch OTA at your home.
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So, OP, there could be a way for you to have local OTA's sent to your house, but it would require an investment and family or a good friend: you could set-up an Amazon Fire TV Recast or TiVo (Basic) Roamio or TiVo OTA in someone's home who has decent internet speeds, and you can access and control that remotely and view it at home on mobile or--with the Fire Recast--your TV.
Both Fire TV Recast and TiVo would require an OTA antenna connected to the unit. HOWEVER, the Fire TV Recast can be placed almost ANYWHERE and does not need to be near a TV because it is a "headless" device.
The TiVo solution does not provide to watch the channels on the TV natively, but you could Cast it to your TV from a mobile device.
I would suggest you ask for help at the TiVo Community Forum about such a solution with TiVo or any other device I don't know of. You can also ask about the Fire Recast solution there or anywhere else. Good luck.
Both Fire TV Recast and TiVo would require an OTA antenna connected to the unit. HOWEVER, the Fire TV Recast can be placed almost ANYWHERE and does not need to be near a TV because it is a "headless" device.
The TiVo solution does not provide to watch the channels on the TV natively, but you could Cast it to your TV from a mobile device.
I would suggest you ask for help at the TiVo Community Forum about such a solution with TiVo or any other device I don't know of. You can also ask about the Fire Recast solution there or anywhere else. Good luck.
I had never heard of ATSC2 so I looked it up and it does exist. What I read said that it was backwards compatible with ATSC1. You say ATSC2 tuners can be provided with an external converter that (apparently?) converts ATSC3 to ATSC2. How does that work, given the backward compatability of ATSC2 tuners with the ATSC1 standard? Were there a lot of ATSC2 tuners manufactured?
Hey, you GOT me. Yes, there is an ATSC 2, but I meant ATSC 1.0. My error. Yeah, NAB dumped ATSC 2.0 for the elegance and advantages of IP, which became ATSC 3.0.
So, what I meant and should have said was that ATSC 3.0 can be converted to feed an ATSC 1.0 tuner DVR using a small USB device. Remember, this was a demo of a concept, so TiVo used a laptop for the firmware and the USB was a standard stick. What it means is that, yes, one can produce an ATSC 3.0 to feed an ATSC 1 tuner device, such as a USB stick, if they want to.
ATSC 1.0 is RF until it feeds into an RF tuner, and that's it. If you want to view it on other devices, it requires a re-coding process. ATSC 3.0 is RF until it feeds into an RF tuner, but then the broadcast RF is no longer in the game after the initial demodulation from, say, a headless device. The data was always in IP, so now you can use any device that we use for IP or "computer" digital packets" that we use today such as a USB device or stream it via our WiFi to our mobile devices, and yes, even stream from the broadcast signal itself to our phones, etc. because the data is already in IP (we would just need to demodulate the original broadcast frequency, but NO RE-CODING necessary. In other words, no Slingbox or re-coding necessary because the TV data is natively IP, which is not the case for ATSC 1.0. This also means we can use the headless device to feed our TV's using the TV's Ethernet/Cat Cable connection, or the TV's WiFi without need of any RF tuner at the TV, or feed it to a converting USB stick to then feed the ATSC 1.0 tuner of the TV or DVR, and I think that TiVo was thinking of feeding DVR's, especially ATSC 1.0 tuner DVR's.
I apologize for my error in referencing ATSC 2.0. I hope that all made sense.
That's hilarious! But I liked your whole post because of the rest of it.
Yeah, transcoding is possible, but computationally intensive. I doubt such a device will ever be produced in significant quantities. It's probably cheaper to build an ATSC3 tuner that converts all the way to video signal compatible with all TVs with HDMI inputs. I don't know this for a fact. It is my WAG.
Another interesting paragraph. OK, so you propose a simplified ATSC3 tuner that just pulls out the video IP stream? That is an interesting concept but it's incompatible with any dumb HDTV, and probably most if not all smart TVs currently in existence. Do you agree with my assessment?
In 1997 they came out with America's Top 50, an 2nd option to their previous sole basic offering of AT40. Well, AT40 was only $20/mo. with no added-on fees. $19.99, actually, as DiSH had to end everything in 9's as it looked like lower pricing, I guess. There had been a few ch adds into AT40 since launch, including the westerns ch. Well, a cx's 4000 went bad, and after I replaced it and got it activated and was going through some of the ch's to verify operation, there was no westerns. A callback to DiSH was met with the news that westerns had been switched from AT40 into the newly-launched AT50, and that while existing cx's with AT40 could keep getting it, they could no longer activate it (such as for a replacement rx) outside AT50- that "hit" no longer existed.
And so my intro to what would become their continual price-jacking. Obviously this cx had just in effect sustained a price increase due to losing programming. They WERE upset over being asked to pony a 25% rate increase to keep getting their fav ch. They further couldn't understand why I couldn't restore their previous programming, as they had a rx in the bedroom that still got the ch....
I should have seen the writing on the wall then, but I was really having too much fun doing sat.
And so my intro to what would become their continual price-jacking. Obviously this cx had just in effect sustained a price increase due to losing programming. They WERE upset over being asked to pony a 25% rate increase to keep getting their fav ch. They further couldn't understand why I couldn't restore their previous programming, as they had a rx in the bedroom that still got the ch....
I should have seen the writing on the wall then, but I was really having too much fun doing sat.
Yeah, thank you. First, I tried to describe my location in my last post above – in a hilly part of Malibu, in the long shadow of the Santa Monica Mountains, hidden from Mt. Wilson (as well as from the other tower site out around San Bernadino).
Your thought above about piggybacking a Tivo or Amazon FireTV on someone else acct is intriguing. But we don't have any family within the same region of local channels, and can't think offhand of a friend in LA who might not be moving within a year or two. I'd like a solution that I don't have to think about for few years. At least if I think of anyone, our own internet is adequate (Frontier FIOS + landline, because we don't have cell reception here either).
I'll still have a convo with Dish support about basic options including local channels. I just haven't had time to gather all my notes – plus someone here might still add more helpful info. Off the top of my head, what we basically *need* are:
the local channels (good during brush fires, earthquakes, etc.), PBS, FreeSpeechTV, C-SPAN, BBC News (in the $12 news package), probably CNN....
and that's about it, unless I could then add on some sports for another $12.
Our recreational TV is covered by HBO, Netflix and Prime, all served via an AppleTV. (we don't have a subscription to Apple's confusingly-named streaming service, just the device).
(Edit: Currently I have the Dish Flex Pack with local and news channels. But with it I'm paying for a bunch of channels we never watch.)
That site is not accurate. I put in my neighbor's address and it said no stations available. I know for a fact he's getting around 50 channels with the Televes DatBoss antenna.
That site was recommended by Tyler the Antenna Man on You tube. It is accurate for my area for sure. Your mileage of course will vary.
This is the one that I found is most accurate in my area. It is run by the FCC:
DTV Reception Maps (FCC)
Keep in mind that is no NO Govt. requirement that TV makers provide an ATSC 3.0 de-modulator in any TV's, unlike the Govt. mandate that all TV had to have an ATSC 1.0 demod. And considering that the broadcasters will still provide "programming" over the ATSC 1.0, I don't think the Govt. will ever require TV's to have an ATSC 3.0 tuner. But, then again, we won't necessarily need them because of the use of IP for ATSC 3.0.
The ENTIRE reason the proposed ATSC 2.0 was dropped was entirely because the broadcasters wanted to use IP, along with a few other changes from the proposed ATSC 2.0 to the now testing ATSC 3.0. The other advantage for the broadcasters to using IP is that they can track our usage and use that data for themselves in any number of ways we probably would resent.
Also, I had heard that the broadcasters may encrypt the ATSC 3.0 datastream? That is much easier to achieve using IP. Recently, It has been feared that the broadcasters want to set-up a pay wall with ATSC 3.0, and they could get away with it because they would still be providing "programming" on the ATSC 1.0 "free" to viewers airwaves.
I put the word "programming" in quotes because there would be NOTHING to prevent the broadcasters from moving the NEW, PRIME-TIME like programming, new episodes, syndication programming now for FREE on ATSC 1.0 and moving it to the ATSC 3.0. The question no one has answered--nor made any commitments--is what programming will EVENTUALLY be available at ATSC 1.0.
I could see the broadcasters slowly, show by show move all new episodes and new series to ATSC 3.0 just as linear TV channels on cable/sat have methodically moved new episodes and some new series behind the streaming pay wall. I would not count on broadcasters airing content exclusively on ATSC 3.0 on ATSC 1.0 for quite some time. None of that is for sure, but drips and drops of info coming out that make perfect sense, and why the broadcasters wanted the advantages of IP.
Personally, I believe they will likely do what is "rumored" at this point (broadcasters are being coy and don't want to make people angry at this early stage). ATSC 1.0 will likely become their "front" services with older shows and newscasts and who knows how that will morph over time to be just 24 hour news and Diginets (Cozy TV; Antenna TV, etc.) and no new programming unless you move over to ATSC 3.0, but we have have to see how that pans out over TIME.
Uh, Malibu is notorious, and those Santa Monica mountains are MASSIVE and just don't permit it, but I don't know exactly where you are, but I would guess your neighbors (I know they could be a long walk away
) don't get OTA, unless they are on a peak themselves.I think for as long as you are in your current location, it is gonna be either cable or satellite.
The cable companies are supposed to have "Lifeline" like service that has a reduced rate that provide local channels, and often, some other channel like CNN or other such channels. Call and ask your cable TV provider and compare a really low cost tier and Locals for Dish, and see which makes more sense.
For news, I think the big locals like KCBS stream their news via the CBS News App and you would select CBS News Los Angeles, using a Roku or Fire TV like device, of course. Other LA locals have similar streaming 0f their newscasts when they are on the air live with newscasts.
Also, news-radio stations are even a better source of breaking news than TV. No, they don't have pictures but they re-act faster and are an excellent alternative to when there is no TV. Is it still KNX and KFWB (owned by the same company (CBS?), I think), or has that changed?
Let us know how this turns out.
