Any ideas why locals have terrible PQ?

Kurtnval

Member
Original poster
Nov 14, 2004
5
0
Indiana
Here is the problem. I have 2 811's in the household and was wondering if anyone could help narrow down why the locals are terrible while the rest of the sat channels are pretty decent. I am receiving the Evansville, IN locals here in southwestern Indiana. The problems I have noticed is that the CBS station is really bad. I watch a lot of the colts games and you can barely read the names on their jerseys during the game. Another example i noticed was during the baseball playoffs when Boston went to 14 innings in that one game and the Cardinals had already started, they switched the cards from the local fox station to the FX station and it was nice and clear on FX while the local Fox was drab and blurry. I would have guessed that it was in the upcast feed from the locals but figured out last week that's not the problem. My brother in law uses a 311 receiver with the same locals and his CBS and Fox were really clear. Could it be a problem with the 811 receiver. My friend in town has the 5 series receiver with DVR and says his locals are bad too! Any thoughts fellow 811 owners?
 
The main reason is that Dish uses an excessive amount of compression on local channels. Since MPEG compression is lossy, the more compression applied, the worse the picture will look.
 
should also note that the compression looks much worse on a HD set then on a normal tv because of the upconversion. Of course most HDtv's are large projection sets too, so that doesn't help either...
 
So it probably has more to do with my HD Digital tv set than the receiver. I need to borrow a non-hd analog tv from someone and try connecting it to see if my tv is the problem. I bet it is the upconversion to 1080i.

Are the locals compressed more than the other channels such as FX?
 
Ota

I agree, you're much better off getting the local channels from an OTA antenna. The picture is great, you save the monthly fee, and you'll get all the HD programming.
 
Any suggestions on OTA antennas?

My next problem regarding the locals is that I don't have an OTA antenna. My neighborhood was built in 1998 and everything is underground including all utilities and cable hookup from Insight. There is one person that has an OTA antenna in the development but it is a small one that is aimed towards Evansville. My local TV store says that I need at least a 40 foot tower. I'm afraid that thing is going to be an eyesore. I went to antennaweb.org and found that the closest three cities for me would be

Evansville, IN (PBS, FOX - 33 miles; ABC,CBS,NBC 46-50 miles away from antennas),

Louisville, KY (PBS,ABC,CBS,FOX-60 miles; NBC-82 miles away), and possibly

Terre Haute, IN (NBC,CBS,FOX-63 miles away). Is there an easy way to see which have a digital channel or do I need to check each stations website?
Any suggestions on antenna's
 
Your antennaweb.org search should have shown you which channels you might get. You can also choose for it to display "Digital Only" channels, and it will list the channels, their orientation, and frequency. Hope this helps.
Tom in TX
 
311 vs. 811 & Compression of Signal

Above it was mentioned that Dish uses a lot of compression of the signal - we have an 811 and experienced the problems mentioned in the first post - Dish was fairly good about responding and in working on the problem hooked up a 311 and the locals became watchable (still see some pixelation, but much better than the 811). Why does the 311 do a better job - and if upconversion is a suggested possibility I question it only because my Mitsubishi 65413 taking in the signal on S-Video or composite says it is displaying at 480i and on DVI at 1080i so the 811 is not upconverting is it? By the way had to do some arm twisting on Dish to let us keep the 311 for free for 1 year because their 811 can't do the job it is supposed to do - they wouldn't go for my pitch that it should be free forever! Oh well.
 

Best SD on Plasma-Dish or Direct or Voom

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