picture quality changed

[gunner44]

dish installed

[dishcomm]

dish installed

thnaks..Call Dish and request a tech..You'll be better off for it...Good luck.

[Barry Erick]

Ghosting, if only on yours is between the dish receiver and your TV. Nothing else. The locals might have some, as dish's default is to obtain them OTA in each market. Otherwise there is no way to get ghosting between the dish and its receiver. Only between the receiver and your TV.

[gunner44]

actually when the tech came out he said he sees this problem every where he goes in the corpus christi area so it is not just me and i receive the locals from dish not ota,,,too many trees and wind to even think about an antenna..

my family says poor pix better than no pix,,they win every time...

maybe it get better when some of the change over settles down next year

[osu1991]

Dish picks up your locals with an antenna before it is sent to the satellite for you to receive. So if the signal that Dish receives has ghosts in it then what you get will have ghosting also. They had this problem when Tulsa's sd locals first launched. FOX23 was horrendous for 2 weeks until they could get a fiber feed from the stations new broadcast center.

[dave2609]

I have seen something similar to this several times...if your local market channels are channel 3 or 4 and you are modulating out on the same channel number try changing your modulator out to the opposite of your local market..(ie. channel 3 is in your area change modulator to 4..)

[WhitePolarBear]

The signals on my local channels contains pixels when there are fast changing picture (such as sports programs). You can also see pixelation around letters with small font size. I think this is an indication Dish has weak local signal feed somehow and they make things worse by data compression. I get the Houston locals. Fox and CW are usually the worst.

[highdefjeff]

Anyways Dish hd package in on may 1 and all acceptable but in december pix quality on all standard def channel worse,,,they have ghosts as an old antenna reception problem,,,pixelation,, and so unclear i cant belive they are digital....

Gunner describes not only pixelation, but a picture "so unclear" he couldn't believe they were digital. He even describes ghosting.

Uh, oh...that's not possible, is it?

It certainly is! Gunner described it for you. It is a fact that digital picture can vary. And not just pixelation, tiling, and macro-blocking, but he also describes an unclear (blurry) picture as well.

So what happened to Gunners system? Did someone sneak in and replace his digital system with an analog one? Nope.

Here’s what happened to gunner44’s system.

His 119 LNB was dying. (This explains why he had problems with his SD, only. Satellite 119 provides the largest portion of the SD programming. His HD was unaffected as the HD programming comes from other satellites.) As the “mini-antenna” in the feed horn began to break down, the signal strength began to lessen. The malfunction in the LNB was probably adding increasing noise, as well. These factors created an ever increasing bit error rate. Bit error rate is the digital cousin to signal-to-noise ratio. Bit error rate is the quality measurement of the signal. It is a function of both noise and signal – it is a signal dependent measure.

“The
bit error ratio

will be affected by both the
data transmission

rate and the
signal

power margin


.”
Definition: error ratio




As the signal weakened, the signal power margin became too small to provide the necessary signal to fully overcome the noise and provide the expected clarity of picture. The signal continued to degrade to the point where there was not enough signal to satisfy the minimum input needs for the receiver. At that point, the 119 satellite was lost – not to be found again until a replacement was installed.

It is a signal issue. And, once again, I will state that digital picture quality can be compromised by low signal, even if you have lock.

[lakebum431]

Here we go again with Jeff's confusion of the facts. You actually stated the problem yourself in your post "His 119 LNB was dying" but then you went on to get confused again: "digital picture quality can be compromised by low signal, even if you have lock" His digital picture wasn't compromised by low signal it was compromised by a dying LNBF, but here we go again...

[highdefjeff]

We obviously agree about everything except the explanation...and who's confused.

You agree that the dying LNB is the cause, yet you want to reject the explanation I offered, based on science, and accept your mystery LNB death? How does that go?

Actually, one of the symptoms of a dying LNB is decreased signal and sometimes, missing transponders. Often, a failing DPPlus Twin LNB will fail this way. They will lose the low number, even transponders sometimes, too.

The explanation I wrote is an accurate description of the situation based on digital signal science. If I incorrectly stated something, let me know.

If we look at Gunner's case, we see that he was indeed watching severely compromised picture quality. It was a digital picture, and to suggest that he was watching his system without locked signal, would be ludicrous. So, his signal had lock AND provided a compromised picture.
Therefore, contrary to popular belief, digital picture quality is not all or nothing. Digital picture quality does vary.

And my statement about compromised digital picture being possible in the presence of low signal is correct as well. Or is there an alternative explanation of degraded picture, based on science?