Is it normal for some of the OTA channels to not show any guide information and others to show full info?
The ones that are not showing info only display the station call letters.
Yes, this is normal. The ones without guide information tend to be channels that Dish does not carry in the satellite-delivered locals. As with everything, there are exceptions to this, though:
- In the event of a dispute with a local station that was previously carried, Dish will often uplink a separate OTA guide data stream for that station, instead of linking the OTA guide to the guide stream for the satellite-delivered channel like they normally would. This way, viewers of that station can ride out the dispute with OTA, including guide data, despite the fact that Dish no longer carries it in the local package.
- When Dish first started providing OTA guide data, they would also provide guide data for subchannels of the main station if Dish carried the main station, even though Dish did not carry the subchannels in the local package. At some point, Dish stopped adding new subchannels to the OTA guide data list, but existing subchannels with guide data got grandfathered in, for the most part. This is why some subchannels may have guide data while others don't. In most of those cases without guide data, the subchannel did not exist yet at the time when Dish stopped updating their OTA guide data list.
With the above rules in mind, though, there are still exceptions to the rules that can only be considered glitches. The most annoying of these glitches (to me, anyway) are cases where Dish actually does carry the station in the local package, yet the guide data for the OTA version still does not work. This is due to the link (that is supposed to put the guide for the satellite-delivered local on the OTA channel in the guide) being broken somewhere in the process, and nobody ever took the time to fix it. WMFD in the Cleveland, Ohio local package is one example of this situation. At least Dish did change the guide to provide one-hour blocks showing the station's call letters. It was not always this way. Previously, there would just be one big, long block in the guide for the channels without guide data. The one-hour blocks make it slightly easier to set manual timers (rather than name-based timers) by simply selecting the block in the guide.
The other
major glitch that needs to be fixed was caused by the repack, and stations entering into frequency-sharing agreements. When this started happening, it caused a problem where after you re-scan your OTA channels, the guide data for the host station will show up on both stations in the guide. I explained why this happens in a recent post in another thread, so I will not go into more details here.
