From the Mailbag: Problems Receiving Our Signal

From: William in University Heights

Q: I just purchased a new HD TV with a digital tuner. I also own several older sets and get excellent reception through a household antenna. However, despite using exactly the same antenna, the reception on my new digital TV is so poor that many stations can not be viewed. This includes both VHF stations, such as WKYC Channel 3, and UHF stations. Can you explain why? I will be very disappointed not to be able to view your station. Although it is often reported that viewers should be able to receive the same stations on digital or analog TVs using normal antennas, my experience shows this is not true.

A: I turned to WKYC Engineer Dave Kushman who handles our transmitter facilities to answer this one - "The fact that you are not receiving any stations well VHF or UHF is telling me you have an antenna issue. DTV and analog reception are totally different. A weak, snowy signal or one with reflections (ghost) will be viewable on an analog set but a DTV receiver does not know how to handle this kind of picture so it basically shuts the channel down.

You are in a location were the signal strength of all the stations is excellent. If you are using an outside antenna, there is probably a broken connection either between the antenna and splitter or splitter and TV. If you're using an indoor antenna, it's more than likely that reflections are causing the problem.

Using a critical eye and the analog tv, look at an analog picture using this antenna. If you see sparkly dots, there's a good possibility there is power line interference getting into the receiver causing the problem. This would be true if you look at our channel 3 and possibly channel 5. If the other UHF analog stations have this kind of problem, it's more likely there is a broken feed from the antenna. I doubt very much that any local interference source could cover that range of frequencies."

You can email your questions to me: fmacek@wkyc.com

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