How is it determined which TV channels I receive?

harshness said:

This is NOT the case. There must be transponders in an area for cable to carry the signal.Cable doesn't "select" stations, they carry the DMA's station and they may carry another DMA's station if there is demand. Cable is not allowed to carry "distant" stations.Here's your guilty party in the "franchising" of DMAs.

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Cable is under "must carry" rules. If a DMA city is close enough to the majority of the systems customers, those customers will receive those channels as significantly viewed. For example. I used to live in Central NJ. My cable company carried all network stations from New York City even though I was located in the Philadelphia DMA. It was sort of cool getting all those NFL games on Sunday. Always had 4 games. Giants, Jets Eagles and one other.
Same deal for people in Southern CT. They get NYC and Hartford.
People in the Hudson Valley of New York get NYC and Albany NY stations. Again, these are CABLE customers

dishcomm said:

I does bo by Zip Code. See my second to last post regarding Scotland and Richmond counties. One can live in one county but get their mail delivered from an adjacent county. The zip code on the mailing address of the residence is the detrmining factor as you the DMA.

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Yep thats what I thought.The southern end of Avery county gets their mail from Spruce pine NC which is in Mitchell county.So anyone with 28777 zip with DTV or Dish gets the Greenville dma instead of Cha.


Its all crazy though imho.From where we live it is 124mi to Charlotte.68 mi to Asheville,roughly 43mi to Johnson City Tn.Yet Charlotte is considered our dma.I know the towers can be closer or further give or take but still Tri Cities locals are closer to us than Cha or Ash.So for reasons I don't quite understand Charlotte is all we can get via sat.

dishcomm said:

I does go by Zip Code.

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It does not go *strictly* by zip code. See my example of Springboro Ohio above. It is zip code 45066 and parts are in Warren County and parts are in Montgomery County. In the past, on Dish's website, you could input your zipcode to see what locals you'd receive and if you input 45066, it then asked which county. Most zips do not get the 2nd question.




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Sure they dont use 9 digit zipcodes.