bonscott87
11-10-06, 09:42 AM
All,
AVS Forum HD Locals Forum: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=45
In this forum there is a thread for pretty much any city/DMA in the country. Find your local thread and find out more info about your HD locals then you probably want to know. Also many of the station engineers actually post and participate.
But what I wanted to post about was an experience we've had in my local market with our ABC station. In our thread there were many posts from those with cable complaining about the ABC station having tons of breakups both video and audio. Many of these people were blaming the "sucky" cable companies for this. But then those of us with OTA posted that we saw exactly the same thing. Ahhhh, it's not a cable problem, it's with the station itself. Luckily the station engineer for that station posted and said they were looking into the problem. Took a couple days but they found a bad cable between the studio and the microwave transmitter. They replaced the cable and viola! the problem went away.
So if our HD locals had been up yet on DirecTV there would be complaints that the HR20 (and HR10 for that matter) is flubbing up with the station. Similar to the DC thread and so forth.
So what I want to encourage people to do if you have trouble with a specific local station is to check your HD locals thread on AVS, post there about your problem, and see if there is a problem OTA. If so, contact the local station engineer and let them know.
This will only get more and more important and as more HD locals go up on sat and OTA gets enabled. Problems with local HD stations used to be very, very common. Not quite as much anymore but still common and unfortunately usually gets blamed on the channel provider (Dish, DirecTV, cable). This is not to say that the problem can't be with your reciever (HR20 or otherwise) or provider but the best place to start is with the station itself. And most of the time if it *is* a problem on DirecTV's end, the local station will have much better luck getting something done then you will calling a CSR. ;)
Good luck to all with your locals.
AVS Forum HD Locals Forum: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=45
In this forum there is a thread for pretty much any city/DMA in the country. Find your local thread and find out more info about your HD locals then you probably want to know. Also many of the station engineers actually post and participate.
But what I wanted to post about was an experience we've had in my local market with our ABC station. In our thread there were many posts from those with cable complaining about the ABC station having tons of breakups both video and audio. Many of these people were blaming the "sucky" cable companies for this. But then those of us with OTA posted that we saw exactly the same thing. Ahhhh, it's not a cable problem, it's with the station itself. Luckily the station engineer for that station posted and said they were looking into the problem. Took a couple days but they found a bad cable between the studio and the microwave transmitter. They replaced the cable and viola! the problem went away.
So if our HD locals had been up yet on DirecTV there would be complaints that the HR20 (and HR10 for that matter) is flubbing up with the station. Similar to the DC thread and so forth.
So what I want to encourage people to do if you have trouble with a specific local station is to check your HD locals thread on AVS, post there about your problem, and see if there is a problem OTA. If so, contact the local station engineer and let them know.
This will only get more and more important and as more HD locals go up on sat and OTA gets enabled. Problems with local HD stations used to be very, very common. Not quite as much anymore but still common and unfortunately usually gets blamed on the channel provider (Dish, DirecTV, cable). This is not to say that the problem can't be with your reciever (HR20 or otherwise) or provider but the best place to start is with the station itself. And most of the time if it *is* a problem on DirecTV's end, the local station will have much better luck getting something done then you will calling a CSR. ;)
Good luck to all with your locals.