Paul Yeager: I want to thank everybody tonight for calling.  We’re getting very good questions, thank you for being patient, thank you for calling.

Paul Yeager: This is very interesting to hear because we’ve heard very little phone calls tonight – the phones ringing because everybody has been on the phone asking questions.  I want to talk a little bit more about the digital cliff effect, the drop off a little bit or just buying an antenna. 

Now, Gary was telling Bill and I here just a minute ago about himself has to buy an antenna and you’re looking at one.  You live in the Chicago area.  You would think Chicago, towers everywhere, but also you’ve got to look at an antenna.  What one for you and your needs are involved?

Gary Sgrignoli: Well, here’s the problem.  It’s different before February 17th than after February 17th.  Right now in Chicago we have channel 2 and 5 are analog, channel 2’s digital is next door on 3.  Well, now I need one of these big antennas.  I’ve had one, I thought I just put it up a few years ago until I looked at the receipt and found out it was 20 years ago.  Time flies when you’re getting old, right? 

So, the problem is if I were to buy an antenna for now I’d want to buy the big one.  On the other hand, channel 2 and 5 analog, their digital is in UHF and they’re staying up there.  And channel 3 is actually moving to channel 12.  So, I like this channel 7 to channel 69 antenna and it’s a little smaller and, of course, it’s newer than 20 years.

Paul Yeager: And this is called the channel 7-69 high band VHF/UHF.  So, bill, what would be the application in Iowa for the second tower we have listed here?

Bill Hayes: A lot of it hinges on what happens in the area you live in.  In the Cedar Rapids/Waterloo market I know that channel 2 is going back to their – is going to stay on the UHF channel.  I don’t believe that there is any other low band VHFs in that market.  So, in that particular case if all that’s there is high band VHF, channel 9 is going to go, I believe – I’m trying to remember who else is up there.

Paul Yeager: KWWL is channel 7, channel 9 KCRG and there’s a Fox station at 28.

Bill Hayes: Okay, so there you have stations that are either high band VHF or UHF.  In that market then this is probably an appropriate antenna because you don’t need the – if you look at the all band antenna, the longest of the elements, you don’t need those because those are the low band VHF elements. 

You can go with a shorter, smaller antenna.  In other places, Des Moines is a good example – in Des Moines all of the VHF stations, including channel 5, are going back to their VHF channels.  In this market, if channel 5 wasn’t going back to channel 5, that antenna would work as well.  But since you have channel 5, that’s a low band VHF, you’re stuck with the larger antenna.

Paul Yeager: Gary, we asked you earlier, this was more about – we talked about the VCR and being able to hook it up.  This is a person who says they have several TVs that are hooked up to the same antenna and they don’t want to buy several converter boxes.  So, can you hook the antenna line into one box and then watch several TVs from that one box?

Gary Sgrignoli: If you’re all watching the same channel then, yes, you can.

Paul Yeager: So, you would lose the ability to change channels independently at each TV.  You would basically be a closed circuit in your house.

Gary Sgrignoli: The only cable line coming in, exactly.  What you do is you take that output and you might go through – Bill is going to show this a little later …

Paul Yeager: I just realized I know that all the TVs will have to show the same program.

Gary Sgrignoli: The answer is yes.  Just like your VCR sometimes has the channel 3 and 4 output, one or the other you select, you could take that and split it two or four ways and go to different TVs with the understanding that you’re going to watch the same channel all at once.  So, the answer is yes.

Paul Yeager: See, simple, we make it easy.  We were talking a little bit about audio.  Can an HDTV/DTV with a built-in tuner have audio problems on just one channel?  All my channels audio and video work great except – this would be somebody in the Des Moines market talking about one of the stations dot-one – the audio is intermittent.

Bill Hayes: That’s a difficult one.  I don’t know if too many – typically the audio – it may be a cliff effect but that would also impact the video as well, so it’s sort of unclear.  If it’s just audio alone that’s a difficult question.  I have not seen that other than the bugs that Gary talks about in some of the early DTV tuners.  But those are pretty well fixed.

Gary Sgrignoli: It could be the stream coming over the air for some reason – look we’re in the infancy of this.  If you’re going to go back and study the history of the analog and black-and-white era and shortly thereafter, color TV, it didn’t work very well, the color TV.  When you bought a color TV in the late 50’s, unbelievable! 

You had to buy a service plan and once a month the RCA truck would roll up and they’d have to adjust it.  Remember for the older people who remember when there were knobs on TVs and menus, it was very unstable.  All of a sudden, as technology advanced it got a lot better.  So, we’re just getting out of that infancy now, and people just have to be a little bit patient and we need to work together and these types of educational programs are excellent.

Bill Hayes: And so that would be – in answer to that question – I’m not aware of anything and I would be inclined to tell that person, can you check with some other folks who you might know that have digital?  Are they seeing the same problem?  Because it sounds very much like a problem on a specific station, it doesn’t sound like their tuner is having a problem, it sounds like to me that they might be having …

Paul Yeager: I think you’ve talked about this, it could be something if you have a question with a specific station you could call the station and say I remember – I know when I worked at one of the stations in Davenport we would get calls, hey, is your HD or digital signal on?  And it would just be a simple thing like that.  So, it might just be a station thing.  But check with a neighbor is a good idea.  Okay, let’s talk about aspect ratio a little bit, is that something we can do?

Bill Hayes: Oh yeah. 

Paul Yeager: 4x3 versus 16x9, I know this is the case with my parents when I hooked up one of their TVs that the image got smaller and it went to the 16x9, they’ve got a 4x3 screen.  That’s going to be part of the deal.

Bill Hayes: Fundamentally we are changing the screen dimensions.  The old analog service the aspect ratio is called 4x3.  Regardless of whatever the units are it’s 4 units wide for every 3 units high.  So, if it’s 9 units high it’s 12 units wide.  If you go to the 16x9 aspect ratio for every 16 units wide it’s 9 high.  So, if you think about it in terms of photographs it’s a different shaped picture. 

Now, if you want to put the 16x9 image in the 4x3 screen and you don’t want to do anything to distort the image your only option is to fill the image – to size the image to fill left to right and if you don’t stretch it you’re going to leave black bars at the top and the bottom.  That’s basically you’re showing the total image and you’re showing it without distortion.

Paul Yeager: Which would be – there were some movies – if you were watching a movie that was shot in letterbox, if there was an image on the left side of the screen there would be some digital transition that would move.  I would see Gary and then all of a sudden …

Gary Sgrignoli: Pan and scan, pan and scan.

Paul Yeager: So, that is what could happen but you also could do a menu option, at least I know on one, is to make it full, but then you’re cutting off the options.  An example was Tuesday night during the election coverage two of the major networks had bars on the side that were following states.  I went to my analog TV and it was a cable signal and I couldn’t see those at all.  So, that’s possible, you’re going to miss something …

Bill Hayes: Exactly, being a fan of old movies and cinematography I kind of like widescreen films.  And so the example I use – that’s called center cutting or cropping – the example that I use on that where, in that particular case, the networks were pretty clever there because what they did was they protected the 4x3 center because that’s where the majority of the audience is but for those people that had widescreen sets they were providing this additional information.  And no harm, no foul to the analog viewers who were just watching the 4x3 and a benefit to the people watching 16x9. 

That worked great because they protected it, they designed it for that.  But now you take a movie that’s show widescreen where – and I always use westerns where there’s a confrontation with the bad cowboy on one side and the good cowboy on the other side and something in the middle of them and they’re discussing it and if you do it in letterbox you see their profiles and you see maybe the mountain behind them. 

And if you crop it suddenly you have two noses talking to each other with a mountain behind them.  And so you kind of lose some of the image there.  So, that’s the challenge we face because not only are we changing from analog to digital, but we are making a serious change just to the shape of the television screen and it has an impact.

Gary Sgrignoli: Let’s just remember one last thing is this is the most major change, in my opinion, ever, not just going from color but from going to radio to black and white TV and it affects every station and it affects every viewer of over-the-air signals.  It’s not trivial.

Bill Hayes: And curiously that particular problem or I don’t know if I’d necessarily call it a problem, that difference is not an over-the-air only problem because a cable service that is taking your high definition feed and feeding it to their standard definition customers, they’re still sending it to a 4x3 set.  The satellite is doing the same thing.  It’s still sending it to a 4x3 set.  So this decision of do you center cut or do you letterbox is a judgment call that the stations have to make. 

Paul Yeager: Sometimes program by program?

Bill Hayes: Probably very wisely if you do it program by program if you can because some programs – we shoot some programs and protect that center, the same way the news people did for the election coverage.  Some programs, if you’re doing an expansive documentary, it’s very difficult.  The most humorous one I heard was from the folks at Sesame Street who said – I hope there are no children watching – who said that they can’t do this with Sesame Street because if they tried to shoot 16x9 and protect 4x3 you would see the people operating …

Paul Yeager: I didn’t know that.  My son doesn’t know that.  He thinks Elmo is right out there.  He should be asleep.  If he’s not we’re in trouble.  Bill was kind enough to let our cameras go into his home recently to demonstrate the performance of several different antenna setups so we’ve had some of this conversation so this will be a good refresher on that.  And we’re going to talk about both analog and digital.  This should help you figure out what sort of antenna that you might want.

Bill Hayes: One of the challenges we face as we go digital is that many people currently use indoor antennas to receive analog services.  Now, indoor antennas work for some folks very well, but they do have their issues.  Indoor antennas have ghosting and noise problems that we’ve just become accustomed to.  We’ve learned that when we see a ghost to move the antenna slightly.  When we see noise we know we’re dealing with a slightly weak signal. 

In the digital world these problems are compounded because unlike analog, which receives and displays the picture instantaneously, the digital signal requires a lot more information to display the picture.  When that information isn’t present, the digital signal fails. 

Let’s compare the two.  Let’s take a look at analog reception using indoor and attic-mounted antennas.  What you see on the screen in front of you is two services, it’s the same service, one being received with rabbit ears showing up on this side of the screen and the other service is using an attic-mount antenna and it shows up on the other side of the screen. 

There are artifacts happening to this picture that are not happening to this picture.  Why?  Everything in this room is impacting the service that’s reaching this antenna.  The signal coming in is bouncing off the walls.  It’s bouncing off the ceiling.  It’s being absorbed by furniture.  All of the things in this room, including myself, are impacting the service. 

And the further I am away from the transmitter site, the more detrimental those things are to the service.  So as you can see, the picture is quite watchable right now, but if I make a small change to the antenna by rotating it, you can see the picture getting noisier and noisier, breaking up, all the while those changes are having no impact on the attic-mount antenna.There’s nothing in the attic interacting with the service, so the attic antenna continues to work fine. 

Now let’s talk a look at the same situation using digital converters.  These two boxes were designed to convert the digital signal they were receiving to analog and display it on a television set. 

On this particular display what I’ve set up is on the left side of the screen is the digital converter box using the attic-mount antenna.  On the right side of the screen is the digital converter box using the rabbit ears, indoor antenna.  As you can see right now both are displaying the signal. 

But it doesn’t take a lot, if I move this antenna slightly, for the digital service using the rabbit ears to start to fail.  As you can see, the image on the left side is going smoothly, the image on the right side is jerky, it has breakups, sometimes called pixilation or macro blocking, frozen screen.  These are all common symptoms of digital services running out of information and being unable to decode the picture. 

So, if you decide that you actually do need to stay with indoor antennas, rabbit ears may not be your best choice.  Notice as I rotate the rabbit ears the picture freezes, it pixilates and I’m not really turning them very much.  It takes very little change to impact the rabbit ears.  On the other antenna we have it’s a directional antenna. 

You’ll notice that when I go over here to this antenna, again, it’s indoor, it’s still in the same hostile environment, but it’s getting a much more stable signal because it’s ignoring a lot of the bounces that are coming in.  So when I move this antenna, it’s less likely to lose signal.  It’s still not as good as an outdoor antenna, but it does do a better job. 

So in an indoor environment, if you have to use indoor antennas, a better choice might be going with a directional antenna like this one or something even larger.  It depends on how far you are from the transmitter site.

Paul Yeager: So, Bill, we just got a look in your home, but there’s something you want to add onto that.

Bill Hayes: The only thing I wanted to point out about that is that one of the demonstrations I did there was to show the difference between rabbit ears, which are not the best choice for indoor reception because of their receipt capabilities, and the directional antenna I used, which was a fairly small antenna.  That antenna worked really well in that environment because I was looking at UHF only signals. 

All the DTV services in Des Moines at this point in time are UHF.  However, after February 17th that antenna will not get everybody.  So, I just wanted to say there are indoor antennas, if you are going to stick with indoor, there are indoor directionals. 

This is an example of one.  It’s an interesting looking antenna but it does work.  The reason it’s designed like this is that, again, we have to have size because of the wave lengths of the lower channels so it does low channels.  It works reasonably well.  Indoor is always more challenging.  By the way, the back thing here is a reflector to actually improve its directivity. 

Paul Yeager: So, that’s not something I saw off of Star Wars?

Bill Hayes: No, no, this is an actual antenna.

Paul Yeager: What would something like that cost?

Bill Hayes: Oh, you’re probably looking at an antenna that is somewhere in maybe the $100 range.  This particular model has a built-in preamp.  So, in addition to being an indoor antenna, it also has an amplifier so in the event that you’re dealing with a slightly weak signal, it will boost it.  The problem we always run into with preamps is the reality of preamps of that they’re really designed to overcome cable loss.  If it’s a noisy signal getting to the antenna, putting a preamp on it is just going to make a bigger, noisy signal. 

Gary Sgrignoli: First of all, just repeat, Bill, what is the front of the antenna versus the back of the antenna.

Bill Hayes: This would be the front of the antenna.  So, if you were setting this on your TV you want to point this part of it, if I hold it this way, you would want to point this point of it towards where the signals are coming from.  This back piece is actually a reflector that sort of blocks the signals coming from behind and improves its directivity. 

Paul Yeager: So, here’s a question for you.  We had a pretty stormy year this summer and I know I had one of my converter boxes up at that time and I was trying to watch the signal when a huge storm was coming through, I’m not but seven miles from a tower, I was still not getting a signal during an emergency time.  Is that something – one, it sounds like I might need a stronger antenna, but is that something that’s going to be of concern during an emergency situation?

Gary Sgrignoli: First of all, in emergencies people do use television as a source of information.  But back in the day we used these things in the 1960s called AM/FM radios.  That still works.  That is not being changed. 

Paul Yeager: Or a weather radio.

Gary Sgrignoli: Absolutely, and so forth.  So, that’s important.  Now, in terms of not receiving a DTV signal properly with storms, number one, it could be the electrical lightening causing problems, impulse noise and those causing it to burst.  The other thing is remember the signals can be very dynamic and the question is how good is your receiver. 

The echo canceller has to track all that.  Last but not least is how do you aim your antennas and so forth.  Remember in that earlier piece I said the analog signal, which shows all the impairments, is the window to the RF world.  Well, when you adjusted an antenna in the past you looked at the picture quality.  You can’t do that with the digital signal. 

You have to turn on the digital quality meter and that’s the meter that goes up and down and so forth and that’s very important.  That’s a great, if you will, diagnostic tool.  Most of your viewers aren’t engineers – signal quality meter.  That gives you the indication of how good is the signal not only coming in but how clean is the receiver making it. 

It gives you an idea of how to possibly adjust the indoor antenna for sure, now, if you’ve got a rotor, if somebody has a rotor, you use that as well.  If you’re up there on the roof adjusting it you have to yell down to a loved one, tell me what the meter reads.

Paul Yeager: Go back, go back, come back.

Gary Sgrignoli: That’s right.

Paul Yeager: Alright, I’ve got a couple of housekeeping things, Bill, I know you’re getting excited there.  We’re going to rebroadcast tonight’s program for you on Monday, November 24th at 8p.m. right here on Iowa Public Television.  That will be Monday, November 24th at 8p.m. and we’re going to rebroadcast that so you can call.  This is also going to be online at iptv.org so you don’t have to wait until November 24th, you’re still going to be able to watch this online, go to a friend’s house, a neighbor’s house, the library if you want to see it online, rebroadcast Monday, November 24th at 8p.m. 

Now, I want to tell you one other thing, if you don’t get through tonight because we know that there’s been lots of busy signals we are open during regular business hours to accept phone calls.  Bill has gotten many of those.  A lot of his staff, they handle those. 

We have a number to call.  It’s a free 800 number, 800-532-1290.  We’re open at 8a.m. and we’re here until 5p.m. so call during regular business hours if you don’t get through tonight. 

We’ve got a couple more questions.  So, I’ve got an old analog TV.  Is there any recycling that goes on?  Say I got a new TV and I just want to do that are there recycling programs or will it be worth anything other than to go as a museum piece?

Bill Hayes: Actually there is.  One of the things we encourage people to do, it would be a good problem if people were all buying new TVs but filling landfills with old TVs is probably not a good idea.  There is actually a Web site that people can go to called mygreenelectronics.org and that Web site you enter some information and it will tell you where places to recycle your television are.  It’s mygreenelectronics.org.

Paul Yeager: We’ll try to put all the sites that are mentioned on our site so you can just go to one spot.  This is a VCR question and these are important because people want to record programs.  But they can record 11 but not 11.2 or 11.3, that would be they’re referring to our station here.  They have had HDTV for a couple of years so now there are multiple shows that they want to watch.  The issue since the signal for say, 11.2, if it’s out of further range, our VCR will record off of .1 or either now or down the road.  It only records off the regular 11.  So, chances are they might be doing just the analog?

Bill Hayes: Essentially what they’ve got, I mean, one of the things Gary touched on a little bit, when you’re setting up your VCR – when I do my DTV information sessions I always bring this up because this is a common question – when you’re programming your VCR to record programming one of the questions that it will ask you is what channel do you want it tuned to.  That’s because inside your VCR is a tuner, and the control unit on that VCR is controlling that tuner and telling it what channel to tune to. 

Unfortunately, that is an analog tuner.  So, if you’re trying to tell an analog tuner to tune to a digital television station, it’s not going to be able to do that.  So, it’s essentially the same problem that Gary was talking about, one of the solutions, it’s not an elegant solution, I sometimes say it is the Red Green solution is to say, okay, you program your VCR to record off of channel 3, which is probably the channel you have your converter box on to and you just manually enter the channel you want to record from. 

The down side is you have to manually tune the converter box to the channel you want to record from.  In this particular case I believe he was talking about having a DTV set which probably means he’s not going to get a converter box.  So, in his case he’s sort of stuck with you either have to get a converter box or one of those alternatives where you can buy a VCR with a digital tuner built into it. 

Paul Yeager: So, why is it on some of my TV sets that I can receive all of the available local channels and others I can not.

Gary Sgrignoli: There are DTV sets that aren’t as good.  It depends when they bought it.  Just as in the early days the TV sets got better and better.  We talked about the 1962, the all channel receiver act that required UHF tuners.  Well, the early UHF tuners were less than desirable in terms of performance.  They got better over the years.  We have some of the older sets still out that if you have heavy severe multipath you’ve got a problem.

Bill Hayes: And if I can interject one other possibility is it also depends on if it’s an over-the-air feed that they’re taping and they’re running it into their home maybe through a splitter and a bunch of other cables, it may be that the set they can get all of this stuff on is closer to the antenna and therefore not suffering as much loss.  As you go further away from it and you go through more splitters you’re essentially taking the signal and dividing it down and so by the time it gets to maybe the set that’s the furthest away from the antenna there’s not enough signal there to drive it. 

Paul Yeager: And that would be a case where – is that the preamp that you’re talking about or an amplifier?

Bill Hayes: You could either put a preamp at the antenna, we always tell people put a preamp at the antenna, preamps are designed to overcome the line loss from the antenna down to the television set.  In this particular case, if they’re getting good signal at the TV they might actually want to put what is called a distribution amp and that is an amplifier you put down at the televisions that are in the house and then it acts to overcome the loss from that point to the distant television sets.

Gary Sgrignoli: A couple of things – we’ve also heard people hooking those splitters incorrectly so one path has got the low loss like it should and the other one has got heavy loss.  That could also explain why some or one of the sets is not working.  Also the type of cable – we encourage people to use RG6 cable.  That’s a type of cable that can go outside, a round coaxial cable with good shielding and so forth. 

The distribution amp as well as the preamplifier, we’ve had cases, especially early on when this was first coming out, when people were in overload conditions to start with and they solved it, of course they didn’t know that, but they solved it by putting in an amplifier.  Oh my gosh, you’re making it worse.  So it’s just educating themselves about what the cause is. 

And then also we have something that as you move further away from the transmitter that signal decreases very, very quickly.  If you’re five miles you get one signal, you double that to ten miles it will go down by not one half but one fourth.  So, people have to be cognizant over what channels they’re trying to receive and where they are in respect to transmitters. 

Paul Yeager: I want to talk about antennas, this is about installation.  This is not our piece of work, there is though one more important question on the lines of those thinking of what they’re exactly going to do, if they’re going to buy a new antenna or upgrading an existing antenna is, what’s involved and how much will it cost?

Depending on where you live, whether you’re at the top of a hill, the bottom of a hill, if you’ve got a tree line around you, whether the set is in the basement or on the top floor of the house, there are a lot of factors that can go into what do we ultimately need to be able to receive that signal, whether it’s an indoor or outdoor or whether we can put one in an attic or not, how many sets are we going to, how many TVs are we hooking up to a particular antenna, those are all factors that could determine what would be the best solution. 

An outdoor antenna on the roof is always going to be better than any other type of antenna just because that antenna is up higher, it’s outdoors, there’s hopefully no obstructions, it’s not going through a wall or anything like that, so that’s the best solution. 

For us to install an antenna, again, depending on the factors as far as how many sets we’re going to and what we have to do to get those lines to particular locations in the house, whether the house is already wired for an older antenna or for cable or whatever, there’s different factors. 

But I would say the average for the cost of material of putting in a new antenna system we’ll say in an attic space or on a roof, most antenna installs that we’re doing here in Des Moines would range from a couple hundred dollars to $300, $400 at the most. 

My antenna at home is in an attic space and I live in a space where I can get enough signal coming through the roof, the signal is adequate that all of my lines are ran through the inside of the house, not on the outside of the house, which ideally would be the best way. 

It’s not going to weather the line as much, it’s not going to weather the antenna being outside in the elements year round, things like that.  That’s not always practical to do, it’s not always possible to do so every job is really different.

Paul Yeager: Thank you very much everybody tonight.  I’d like to thank Bill Hayes and I’d also like to thank Gary Sgrignoli.  Gentlemen, thank you very much, great discussion. 

It moved by in a hurry and a quick reminder we will rebroadcast this on November 24th.  You can always call regular business hours to IPTV to get any answers for anything that you need there.  That number is 800-532-1290.  And remember digital TV truly is better. 

For many the transition will be easy, and for others it may require some effort, a little resourcefulness and being a wise consumer.  Don’t be afraid to ask for help.  Call a grandson, a granddaughter, you can also get more information at IPTV at our Web site which is iptv.org including a way for you to send us questions by e-mail and in a few days you can watch that program again online at iptv.org. 

We also encourage you to call us during our normal business hours, that’s 800-532-1290.  For the entire Iowa Public Television staff, my name is Paul Yeager, thanks for watching this special edition of The Iowa Journal.  Good night.

Funding for Digital TV Questions and Answers: An Iowa Journal Special is made possible in part by the support of the Broadcast Technology Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.  And by Friends of Iowa Public Television, generations of families and friends who feel passionate about Iowa Public Television programs.  MidAmerican Energy Company, helping to harness renewable sources of electricity through their investment in wind power.  Information is available at midamericanenergy.com.  MidAmerican Energy, obsessively, relentlessly at your service.