I haven't had my VOOM receiver hooked up in months, but I plugged it and this is what I came up with:
2. No big deal. There is no check mark next to "Activate" on my receiver and it works just fine. (see picture below)
3. I used to have two OTA antennas connected to my VOOM STB via an A/B switch: Washington DC (home DMA) and Richmond VA - see the pictures below. I used to pull program data for local channels (in my home DMA) from VOOM, so channels like 4-1 (NBC), 7-1 (ABC), and 9-1 (CBS) show up with no station identifier. However, the channels I picked up while scanning (mostly Richmond) still show up with their station information since I pulled this directly from the station.
4. In a nutshell, your local station has both an existing analog channel (old TV channel) and corresponding digital channel (new digital TV channel) - the RF is nothing more than a Radio Frequency assignment by the FCC. In my case, if you will refer to the photos, my local ABC has been assigned the following:
Analog TV: 7
Digital TV: 39
Remapped: 7-1
Channel 7-1 is nothing more than your digital tuner remapping channel (RF) 39 to what you know it as. In you case, I believe you have a local CBS channel 5 in Phoenix AZ. It's assigned digital channel is 17...and it will be remapped to 5-1 on your VOOM STB. Remember, the VOOM STB only has a digital tuner...it will not receive analog TV channels.
Also, check out the following sites and you will see a clear picture of DTV in your area:
http://www.antennaweb.org
http://www.hdtvmagazine.com/programming/broadcast-market.php?dma_name[]=Phoenix+%28Prescott%29
5. You will need to supply more information before we can begin troubleshooting you problem: type of antenna (make, model, UHF/VHF), indoor/outdoor, clear line of sight, distance from local broadcasters, etc.
Hope this gives you a good start and I hope this makes sense...busy doing a million and one things at once this morning. Also, I just noticed there is a 39k file attachment size placed on my account after yesterday's upgrade. I had to compress the pictures to the point they look horrible. I will check with the administrators and upload better pics if possible. Also, the last picture shows you where to plug in the OTA antenna.
Riff...