Paul Yeager: If you want to call during regular business hours you can call 800-532-1290 and we'll have one of our trained engineers talk you through whatever question that you have.  You can also send an e-mail to iowajournal@iptv.org.  Is there anything you want to add to what we just were talking about in that presentation?

Bill Hayes: I think we covered it pretty well as far as the basics go.  As we're hearing from the telephone calls we're getting a lot of the issues are fairly specific and one of the things that makes this so difficult to explain to people is that the local conditions.

When I say local I mean local within your home, can have a pretty dramatic impact on your ability to receive, conditions of your existing antenna, your existing system the RF cabling you're using, all those things can have a detrimental effect.  So, even though you might have been getting passable analog it still may create problems for you in the digital.

Paul Yeager: Gary, let's theorize about that.  Did we anticipate this was going to be a problem when we were talking about some of these transition issues?

Gary Sgrignoli: I think part of the issue was the managed expectations wasn't quite there.  What we're trying to do right now is to give people a quick course in over-the-air.  Somebody who is 50, 60, 70 years old remembers the olden days.  The young generation, younger generation knows cable and satellite and they don't understand some of the basic principles. 

And the receive system, the antenna, the coaxial cable, splitters, amplifiers, things like that are just important because that's the last piece.  These broadcasters here, Iowa Public Television especially, has got everything optimized.  But the other half of the equation is just as important and that is why those folks have to be learning some of the basic principles.

Paul Yeager: I'll tell you an example, I grew up east of Waterloo which is where the Rowley towers are all at, so the Cedar Rapids and Waterloo stations there.  My parents put in the antenna a long time ago and had not been able to get the analog stations.  We got them a converter box and was able to finally get through. 

My mother can finally see the CBS station and she can see all three of the IPTV stations and so it's just been a world opening.  An elderly neighbor we have I went over and helped hook up hers, same infrastructure it was old inside the house, the antenna maybe outdated, maybe something got frayed and now was through the converter box, boom, everything is going so well for her.  So, is that an encouraging sign for people that there is help if you want to go through that box?

Bill Hayes: I think the thing that we all -- it's probably in our nature because a lot of times we tend to dwell on the problems and not so much the successes. 

Iowa Public Television, we've been doing these DTV information sessions throughout the state and I've done I think sixty some of them so far and I generally have a few people that come to us, especially now that more converter boxes are out, that have the success stories where they are very pleased with what they're seeing. 

We're seeing lots of people who are now getting more services than they ever got before and very happy with it.  The people we're most concerned about are the people who bought the converter box or who tried it, they turned it on and it just didn't work for them and then they just disconnected it, said this doesn't work and put their analog service back up and back to watching it because their analog service is there now but down the road it may not be there. 

So, to Gary's point, we are asking people to make a bit of an effort and I don't want to minimize it but a lot of the problems that we deal with when we talk to these people are not insurmountable problems, they're just we've kind of gone through this generation where nobody has ever thought about over-the-air broadcasting, it's come out of a cable for so long for so many so we're sort of stuck with this gap that we have to figure out how do we fill it. 

For us it's really important because not only am I a big fan of over-the-air broadcasting because it's free and I don't have to pay for the services I get but it's also very important in the digital world I watch us off cable and watch us off of over-the-air and over-the-air looks better.  I'm not knocking cable but the most pristine thing to do is to take this signal from its source and decode it once.  That's what I do with my digital service.

Paul Yeager: I've heard you describe it in staff meetings that we've had here if it is cable it does go through a couple of compression lines and some of the signal starts to lose a little bit by the time it gets to your home. 

I want to ask you both, maybe Gary you can help me out with this, there are people who still record programs that might not have a TiVo or a digital recording device inside their TV and they still want to watch a program and program the VCR.  It is supposed to work with a VCR but how does it do that?

Gary Sgrignoli: A couple of things, right now prior to February 17, 2009 you have both analog and digital so of course it's still going to work with an analog signal. 

After February 17th all the full-power stations will have turned off their analog.  You need a converter box in front of there just as you do in front of the older traditional analog TV sets. 

The down side you've got to understand is that when you program a VCR that changes to whatever channel you program it too.  Unfortunately, when you put the converter box in front of it you've got to manually put it on the channel you want.  So, if you're recording only on one channel you're okay.  So, that's the only caveat. 

However, let me say you can right now, as Bill said the digital signal has been on the air for the last nine, ten years across the country, the bottom line is you can go out and buy a VCR, not by itself, but a VCR/DVD player inexpensively with a digital tuner in it.  So, you can do that and that's not a problem.  It's just if you want to use your older analog VCR you need a converter box in front of there just as an old analog TV set does.

Paul Yeager: So, if you're looking and the heads are a little worn on your VCR and you want to upgrade but still keep that VCR it's possible that you'd still be good.  I did not know that there was a digital tuner in some of those.

Bill Hayes: Yeah, and the only caveat I have there is that there are also VCRs out on the market that the mandate that is out there that took place on March 1st required everything with a tuner in it to have a digital tuner.  So, there are some VCRs out there that don't have tuners in them, they don't have digital, they don't have analog.

Paul Yeager: Again, it could be old inventory so it's best to ask a clerk.

Bill Hayes: And if you don't incorporate any tuner into it you're not really violating the law or being deceptive because the boxes I've seen are labeled no tuner included.  The idea here is these are probably VCRs for people who want to replace their -- they've got old tapes and their VCR crashed and burned, the analog tuner is going to go away so this is for the person who wants to play only or who wants to record from video sources.

Paul Yeager  Which would be if you, say, have satellite TV and it was coming into your old VCR, that's still the way you would have recorded was to come in and have to have that channel specific, you wouldn't really be able to set a timer other than to come on and make sure that your satellite channel doesn't change up and down automatically?

Bill Hayes: Exactly.

Paul Yeager: You two have also done another primer here and this would be another good time to talk about that one a little bit.  This is from Bill and Gary that we recorded earlier this evening.

Bill Hayes: Let's talk a little bit about the paths these signals take to your house.  Since we've already told you that we're using the same television bands, the same television channels, they're the same size, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the paths they take are the same. 

On this graphic here we're showing you the broadcast band and if you'll notice in the green we're showing the television channels.  One of the things you should notice is that even though on the television dial they're right next to each other, in reality they are actually separated. 

In between channels 6 and 7 there is some space, in between channels 13 and 14 there's some space.  As a matter of fact, if you'll notice, the FM broadcast band, FM radio is actually just above channel 6.  So, it should be noted that because these channel bands are in different portions of the spectrum they behave differently when they are being broadcast. 

So, let's talk a little bit about the behavior.  If you're watching low band VHF, low band VHF is the lowest power to travel the furthest.  So, it's a very economical way to get the signal out.  The down side is, is that because it's lower power it's very susceptible to electrical noise, the white sparkles you see on the picture of an analog set when someone turns on a vacuum cleaner or a blender.  It also requires a much larger antenna. 

As you go down in channels the receiving antenna gets larger.  The next area to look at is the high band VHF, channels 7 through 13.  In this case when you're using those channels you're trading power for distance.  It's a pretty good trade.  It takes more power to go as far but the advantage you gain is it's much less susceptible to electrical noise and you can use a much smaller antenna to receive it.  The final area to look at is the UHF band. 

UHF requires the most amount of power to go the same distance.  However, its advantage, it is completely immune to electrical noise and it also requires a much smaller antenna to be received.  So, if in your home you're watching analog television that's on VHF and UHF you shouldn't be surprised that when digital services start they're going to be on VHF and UHF as well.

Gary Sgrignoli: Let's look at some of these propagation paths that bill was talking about.  First of all, analog and digital signals travel essentially in a straight line.  For a 2000 foot tower that line of sight limit is due to the horizon somewhere around 50 to 60 miles away from the transmitter. 

Unfortunately, in many areas there are train effects that can adversely affect that propagation.  For instance, if you have hills and mountains that will block the signal but not just naturally occurring obstructions, manmade obstructions since as buildings and water towers and so forth. 

Looking on the next diagram we can see that there are multiple paths possible, possible because of reflections off of these buildings and water towers, etc.  The key thing is you desire one direct path between transmitter and receiver for the best reception.  If you have a directional antenna with a low enough beam you may be able to reject some or maybe even all of these extra echoes that exist at the antenna input. 

Finally, on the next slide you will see that you can have some multi-path effects in the home bouncing off the walls and other objects coming in through various windows and so forth making DTV reception much more difficult than with an outdoor antenna which is why we greatly encourage you to use outdoor antennas whenever possible.

Paul Yeager: As you can tell from our program it's been a very busy night here at Iowa Public Television.  You can send us an e-mail at iowajournal@iptv.org.  But I also want to tell you, you can call during regular business hours, we're open from 8-5 here at Iowa Public Television.  You can call 800-532-1290.  Some of the same people that are here will get your call and they'll be able to get back to you.  So, if you don’t' get your question answered tonight or asked tonight you still can do that.  First thing these are some of the emails that have come in.  Gary had talked about 90 days on the coupons.  What if you have an expired one?

Bill Hayes: Boy, that's a tremendously difficult question because there's not a technical answer to it but there is an answer and the answer is that from the standpoint of the NTIA, the National Telecommunication Information Administration, the people that administer the coupon program, if the coupon is expired you're done.  And they have pretty much said they're not going to, even though there's been some recommendations for doing more to reinstate them or something they're very resistant to that. 

Paul Yeager: So, if you still have one that is not expired please try to use it ahead of time.  What about doctor's offices?  There is a gal who writes that she works at a nursing home, an office, that was just recently.  Tell me about that expansion of the program.

Gary Sgrignoli: They are allowed in nursing homes and facilities like that to use the coupons.  My understanding of it -- this is not a technical question, it's all legal and so forth -- is that people who work there can apply for that individual even though it's all coming from not a single family home which is their unit which is the original plan and they can get their service.  Now, those are the people who really need help.  One would hope the staff would help set it up and show them and so forth.

Paul Yeager: This one is about converter box, they have a GE digital converter box and somehow on the menu all of them are in Spanish.  So, is there a quick way, unplug it and reset it?  Would that do it?

Gary Sgrignoli: I'm sure that will do it.  No habla espanol.  You have to start guessing or get somebody who speaks Spanish.

Bill Hayes: A lot of the boxes have the ability to basically do what we do, what technically we call a first birthday, and basically you reset it to its original defaults.  Unfortunately those tend to be part of the menu system so if the menu is in Spanish you don't know where it is anyway.  But a call to the manufacturer or an e-mail to the manufacturer might get the instructions that you could follow. 

Paul Yeager: Chances are – I think I’ve seen this one.  I think I’ve gotten it myself.  If you’d hit the menu button, chances are just the word “menu” is probably going to be in English.  I’ve seen that on some of the screens as well.  I want to follow up to Gary’s response here.  I’ve just been told that retirement homes and the like, the government has allowed them to get a coupon.  That’s a good thing there because there is a large group of people that are there.  This one is more about audio garble.  They say the picture is great but there’s some issues when it comes to audio.  Is that even possible? 

Bill Hayes: It’s difficult.  Gary says yes.

Gary Sgrignoli: There’s been some early receivers out there that had a bug in it.  And so my suggestion, the only recourse is talk to the manufacturer or go back and talk to the store, depending on the type of store that you went to and their return policy.  By the way, there’s a very detailed set of rules about returning boxes and coupons.  You don’t get any of that $40 back at all.  Just keep in mind that coupon doesn’t cover tax and all that stuff.  I would suggest taking it back.  If you can’t get anything from the manufacturer, take it back to the store and see what they’ll – see what they can do? 

Paul Yeager: Chances are some of these models change even as little as six months? 

Bill Hayes: Oh yea, the current list of converter boxes – Gary and I were talking about this earlier today – the current list of converter boxes is up around 150 or 160 individual models.  We were kind of snickering at there’s a large number of them that are not available in stores and, when you ask about them, they find out they’ve been discontinued.  They’ve never been delivered, but they’ve been discontinued. 

So again, there was a big push to get this technology rolled out, so some early prototype models that were certified, people discovered, hmm, that probably isn’t going to work out very well.  So, they went back and they released a model and pulled it back and here’s a replacement model. 

Paul Yeager: So it’s a lot to keep track of even for the staff because I know, Bill, that your staff is like, okay, what’s the model number?  That’s just hard to do.  How is that even for the folks who know what’s going on how difficult that is?

Gary Sgrignoli: You know, a lot of people just over the years of television would depend on word of mouth, you know, what’s the best place to get your car fixed, where’s the best place to buy a TV set and so forth?  It is difficult.  Remember, the converter box is, in essence, a one-time market for the United States.  And once the coupons stop being given out, then that market ends.  Now, maybe for our countries that adopt ATSC – you have to remember, that’s why a lot of these decide, well, we’re not going to put these into the stores and so forth. 

Paul Yeager: I want to talk a little bit more about reception.  We just kind of touched a little bit there on the dot-one.  If you’re in an area that before you kind of had a snowy and fuzzy picture and you might feel like you’re a little farther out – in Iowa we don’t have the mountains that they do in Colorado or lakes of Chicago or the Great Lakes that also can eat a signal a little bit.  Let’s talk about the reception issues.  Gary, when we talk about this, it’s either there or it’s not, the picture. 

Gary Sgrignoli: For the most part – we’ll talk about that, the digital cliff effect and so forth.  People say that’s a bad thing.  Well, it depends.  It could be a good thing if you’re on the correct side of the cliff where you’re getting no errors on the digital and you’ve got a perfect picture and sound.  No complaints about that.  The thing is that the government had expected a reasonable effort from the viewer for the antenna, the cable, doing that correctly to help the signal reception. 

Paul Yeager: Have you looked behind you to see what’s behind you?  There’s all these antennas.  There’s different kinds of antennas behind both of you.  So tell a little bit about each of these.  I mean, they’re common on homes that might not live within eye distance of an antenna.  Let’s break it down just a little bit what we’ve got here. 

Bill Hayes: What we’ve got is an array of various sundry antennas.  If we look at the ones that are behind Gary, I mean at the very top there, you’re looking at the all-band VHF/UHF directional antenna.  This would be the antenna you’d use if you were fairly far out, 50 miles out, 60 miles out.  This is an antenna that’s designed to focus its reception capabilities in a direction and receive the signal from that direction.  At distances you have to collect a lot more of the signal to get good reception. 

Gary Sgrignoli: If I could interject something.  Go ahead.  That all-band antenna, that’s a very important point that he’s making is for all three of the television bands that you saw in that earlier piece that Bill talked about. 

Paul Yeager: You mean the UHF, the VHF. 

Bill Hayes: Actually VHF is two bands. 

Paul Yeager: Let’s say that again because it’s important to hear these things a couple of times.  People are going to try to buy these and we want to make sure that everybody has the right info. 

Bill Hayes: But it is important because it affects some of the antenna designs.  One of the laws of physics, if you will, about antennas and television is that the lower the channel you’re tuning to, the bigger the antenna is to get it.  So, if you’re tuning to channel 2, you need the largest antenna over the largest array. 

Paul Yeager: We do have one in Iowa.  KGAN out of Cedar Rapids is one of those.  That’s the only two in the state that’s primarily in the state.  So, if you’re in that Cedar Rapids/Waterloo area that’s specific – or in Mason City, where channel 3 is as well. 

Bill Hayes: Again, I mean, speaking to the specifics, and I know a little bit about the market from doing enough presentations.  In the case of channel 2 in Cedar Rapids, their decision has been is they’re not going to go back to channel 2 for their digital transmission.

Right now their real digital service – and we’ll talk a little bit about these virtual channels, but their real digital service is actually on UHF 51, and their intent is to stay on that channel because there are some – I talked about it a little bit in that piece – electrical noise and things like that. 

There are some disadvantages to the low band VHF that in the analog picture it shows up as the white sparkles.  In the digital picture, it just will slow up as blockiness, macroblockiness.  When digital is failing, no matter what the cause, the viewer – on the screen it generally looks the same. 

Gary Sgrignoli: I’ve got one more quick thing.  Go ahead.  It’s been said that the law that prohibits you putting up outdoor antennas was struck down from the 1996 Telecommunications Act.  The real problem is then not a legal one, it’s I don’t want to get my neighbors upset and so forth, but keep in mind their neighbors have little satellite dishes, and if you find out that the actual channel, not the virtual channel but the actual digital channel, is that UHF, you look up there and see some of the UHF only antennas aren’t so bad.  And therefore you can have a smaller antenna on your roof and not get your neighbors upset. 

Paul Yeager: So, you might not need the largest is what you’re saying. 

Bill Hayes: Yes, the antenna that’s third down there, we have them labeled number three, that’s a UHF only antenna.  So if you compare that to the all band at the very top, you can see it’s considerably smaller.  You could actually – if the side of your house faces the transmitter site, you could mount that at the side of your house. 

Paul Yeager: There it is at the bottom.  They’re going to take the graphic off, and you can kind of see it.  It’s the bottom one right there.  That’s the one on the bottom side of the screen.  That’s the one you’re talking about with the yellow dot.  I think you both have had yet another primer and we want to get into that just a little bit.  This one focused a little more on some of the specific reception issues.  We got into a little bit of that, but here’s another look from Bill and Gary.

Gary Sgrignoli: Let’s talk about television reception.  When one experiences in the analog world a strong signal, you’d expect a great picture.  And as the receiver were to move farther and farther away from the transmitter site, the signal would get weaker and weaker, and you’d expect poorer and poorer signals due to the noise, the noisy picture.  Remember that the analog TV set is the window to the RF world and shows all these impairments. 

On the other hand, you can have a strong signal and still not have a good picture.  Those white speckles that Bill talked about from electrical machinery can show up.  You can have multipath that show up from reflections and echoes and so forth.  So, you can have a bad picture. 

Let’s talk on the next diagram the digital signal.  When you look at the digital signal, instead of the gradually degrading picture with signal level, you get a nice, perfect picture as the signal decreases in level up into some point where you start taking errors and you overtake the system.  When that happens, you change from an error free perfect picture and sound to an all error frozen picture and muted sound.  That’s not a good thing. 

Therefore, you want to stay away from this cliff effect that we referred to earlier.  When you have margin, you will have good, consistent reception.  In order to get that margin you want to have a very good antenna properly placed and properly aimed.  Bill? 

Bill Hayes: Let’s talk a little bit about the digital television reception.  Most television stations, the majority, have two channels assigned.  One is the analog channel and one is the digital channel. 

Most of the digital channels are in the UHF band and a few in the VHF band.  After February 17, when broadcasters shut off their analog channels, some of them will migrate off of the UHF service back to the VHF channels.  Some will change channels entirely. 

One of the concepts that’s important to grasp in all this is called virtual channels.  Since there were two channels assigned, virtual channels were assigned so that you, the viewer, did not have to learn a whole bunch of new channels. 

If you were used to watching a station on a certain channel even on the DTV tuner, you could tune to that channel and you could find it, even though it’s not the actual channel.  The other part of it was that it let broadcasters keep their identity.  Some broadcasters have a lot invested in how they are known and some of them use their channel numbers. 

Virtual channels are kind of like call forwarding.  You do the scan.  The receiver establishes this connection.  And when you call for that channel, that analog channel, if you will, on your DTV tuner, it knows you really need to go to this channel.  That’s important to remember because after February 17, some broadcasters are going to change and go back to their channels. 

The problem is that virtual channels are not really well known so that it makes it difficult for you to select an antenna because if the real channel is a low band VHF and the virtual channel is a UHF channel and they’re going to stay in UHF, a low band VHF antenna isn’t going to help you.  So a little later in the show we’ll show you a Web site that will help you determine what the real channels you’re going to be receiving are and what antenna you need. 

Another concept you need to grasp is scanning.  Scanning is very important in digital because scanning is what determines the relationship between the actual channel and the virtual channel.  When you first turned on your DTV tuner, if you’ve got one now or are going to get one, one of the first things it’s going to want to do is scan for channels. 

After that process happens, it has established those relationships.  However, on February 17, when all of this shuffling takes place, it’s real important that you scan again because some of those relationships are going to change and your DTV tuner won’t know it unless you scan for it.  So remember, scan and rescan.  It will help you receive digital television.