[BC] Subsidy For Digital TV?

[Davis, Jack L. KTXL]

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Message: 2
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 00:19:47 -0500
From: "SHAFFER, RANDY L" <RandyShaffer at ClearChannel.com>
Subject: [BC] Subsidy For Digital TV?
To: <broadcast at radiolists.net>
Message-ID:
	
<99630CD1F13E4147A13F9D6214100A5D02FB9D6F at CCUMAIL31.usa.ccu.clearchannel.com
>
	
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  Jack wrote -
>>My favorites are the LG's (also badged as Zenith), the Sylvania (Made by
>>Funai and sold by Sears) and the US-DTV.  They are all sensitive and
perform
>>well in a multipath environment.

 Rich responded -
>Any idea which chipset the Samsung SIR-T451 uses?

I agree with Jack, my Zenith has been really good compared to my first
tuner. We have tried Samsung units here at the station with various issues.
The early ones just didn't pick up well and had dropouts. I saw a number of
them on the "out-of-box" special shelf at Circuit City. I asked them why
they had so many and was told that the Samsungs had some problems but the
newer
units were much better. We had a newer unit at the station that constantly
overheated. We finally stuck a muffin fan on top and that took care of it.
Our most recent tuner is a Motorola and that seems to perform well.

Randy Shaffer
WLYH-TV/WHP-TV
Harrisburg, PA

It is tough to try and determine which generation of HD decoder chips a
particular set top box uses.  One thing that may help is all boxes have a
date of manufacture on them.  Generally anything after mid 2003 will be at
least generation 3.  If it is an older design and continued past mid 2003 it
could have older chipsets.  If you can power the box on and look at the
close caption decoder portion of the menu there may also be a clue.  The
later chipsets had a lot of set up for the close captions, the older boxes
were for the "Grand Alliance" standard and the later ones used the EIA-708
standards which can be set up for font color, border and other graphic
nuances.  The grand alliance standard was much less feature rich.  If you
have a decent signal at your location almost any of the boxes will work
pretty good.  I have experimented with at least a dozen different boxes and
they all worked in a decent environment, but they all have differences in
features and performance to some degree.  I would avoid the Dish Net 6000
and the earlier Panasonic receivers for performance issues.  The Samsung
SIR-T150 and SIR-T151 work OK but they have some hinky things with audio and
close caption integration.  If you do not need close captioning they may be
OK for you.  The newer Panasonic box is smaller than average but it has
minimal PSIP implementation and no guide information. If your local
affiliates have weather radar or other low bandwidth signals on they may not
decode them properly.  If you don't care about the guide or the narrow
bandwidth channels they work OK.  

The Sylvania is interesting as it does both analog and digital on the same
box.  The weird thing about it is it gets time signals from the analog close
caption XDS signal.  In my case this normally comes from the local PBS
channel and here it is on channel 6 so my UHF only DTV antenna did not get
sufficient signal to keep the clock accurate.  Again if you don't need the
guide to be on time it is very feature rich.

One thing that would also work for you would be an old Voom satellite
receiver.  They went away and the satellites were purchased by Dish Net.
They replaced all the Voom boxes and they should be around for cheap!  You
have to enter a zip code into the set up screen to make them work in a given
area but I know a couple of our viewers that have them and they got them for
free.

My all time favorite is the later LG / Zenith boxes.  I got my LG LST-3100
on E-Bay for $140 a year and a half ago so perhaps you can do better.  The
set top box business has been slow due to the fact that the display
manufacturers have gone to the cable card system.  It is a small card that
looks like the PCMCIA card on a lop top computer.  It plugs into the newer
displays and you have instant HDTV VIA cable.  They do not do a program
guide like the off air guys do as the cable normally has a specific channel
devoted to guide information.

You will notice an improvement even with an analog NTSC display, no noise or
interference.  Just make sure that the STB does the format your monitor
uses.  I use an old 4:3 Sharp TV set at work with a Samsung 151 STB to
monitor our DTV signal.  At home I have the Panasonic 34 inch CRT 16:9
display with the LG box.  The World series is on now and it looks
outstanding!

Jack 
K6YC