Time Warner Temporarily Removes CBS in Major Cities.

[mwooldri]

14. "snowy" ???

In "Ye Olden Analogue Days", I'd say that I got about 3-4 channels here in the Greensboro, NC area that I would consider a "good" picture. The others were "watchable" but certainly had snow, ghosting and obvious other interference in the picture.

Digital has changed all of that. The picture you get is either there, or not. There is the "digital cliff" where the signal cannot be decoded properly by the receiver so the picture becomes blocky and the sound is choppy.

An outside antenna (if possible) really helps. So our current home set up can now receive all of our "in-market" channels, plus a few of the stations from outside the local area (Raleigh, NC and Roanoke, VA). With the exception of our NBC affiliate, all stations come in with a steady, unbroken picture 98% of the time. The NBC affiliate breaks up more often because of the way the antenna is mounted and it doesn't have a rotator as in days gone by.

I'm sure that given an outdoor antenna hooked up to a TV set capable of receiving digital broadcast signals, you could receive a good version of ABC, and quite likely many others. Even with an indoor antenna improvements are obvious - stations that were "there" but unwatchable are clean and clear in digital. Now I will state that people who had access to a certain channel in analog days lost it with the digital switchover

Try this link http://transition.fcc.gov/mb/engineering/dtvmaps/ - plug in your address, and see what the FCC thinks you should be able to receive. The stations in green are ones you should be able to get easily with an indoor antenna. The yellow ones should be easy with an outdoor antenna but a bit of a struggle with an indoor one. The orange ones do need an outdoor antenna and even then there is no guarantee of getting them.

If your address comes up with a lot of "green" stations, give it a go with an indoor antenna... even if it is a lot of "yellow" ones try it anyway, because it could work.

As for that ABC station being "snowy" there is an unlikely possibility that the station in question is being transmitted in analogue from a nearby translator. Low powered stations and translators can still broadcast in analogue in the interim - though why the switch wouldn't be made I don't know... a local low-powered TV station whose signal was barely watchable outside of Reidsville, NC... when they went digital they did manage to get a channel to broadcast on and gained a larger coverage area, even though there was no increase to the transmitters' power output.