What was that icon on the old receivers?

[GaryPen]

For some reason, I just remembered how, back in the day with my old 4700 and 3700, a strange icon would appear on the screen on occassion. It was two overlapping circles, kind of like the Mastercard logo.

Does anybody know what that was? I've always wondered.

 

[NightRyder]

For some reason, I just remembered how, back in the day with my old 4700 and 3700, a strange icon would appear on the screen on occassion. It was two overlapping circles, kind of like the Mastercard logo.

Does anybody know what that was? I've always wondered.

I believe it indicated that error correction was being applied to the signal.

NightRyder

 

[ken]

You may be thinking of (what I believe was) an old form of anti ghosting that I think 1 or 2 of the super-stations were using. I'm not sure if its the same thing but several years ago a couple of the super-stations had a icon pop up every once and a while. I could not figure it out and asked someone in the know and was told it was to indicate whenever special equipment attempted to compensate for ghosting. Another theory was it meant WGN was using a non local (Chicago) feed to uplink when the program was not licensed for nationwide broadcast.

 

[HokieEngineer]

I remember this a long time ago too. It was on some of my local stations. The screen also would increase in brightness for a quick second then return to normal.

The IRD didnt do this, it was whatever encoding equipment they had setup to receive the channel either from OTA or a dish.

Anti-ghosting seems to make sense.

 

[GaryPen]

It wasn't that long ago. Maybe 2 or 3 years. It really seemed to be from the Dish receivers. I never saw it when watching the same channels on cable at that time. It was only on Dish.

Did nobody else see this dual-circle logo/icon on the lower part of their screen?

 

[Bobby]

It wasn't that long ago. Maybe 2 or 3 years. It really seemed to be from the Dish receivers. I never saw it when watching the same channels on cable at that time. It was only on Dish.

Did nobody else see this dual-circle logo/icon on the lower part of their screen?

I do remember seeing an icon on the lower left corner of the screen from time to time. I thought it was the ATT logo for their cable systems. I was always amused when I saw it.

 

[mkm4]

It wasn't that long ago. Maybe 2 or 3 years. It really seemed to be from the Dish receivers. I never saw it when watching the same channels on cable at that time. It was only on Dish.

Did nobody else see this dual-circle logo/icon on the lower part of their screen?

Your cable company was probably getting a direct feed and dish may have been using an OTA antenna which would have been susceptible to the previously mentioned ghosting.

 

[GaryPen]

I guess a number of local SF area broadcast stations were using this anti-ghosting deal. It's odd that I never saw it when watching cable, only Dish. At the time, it didn't occur to me that it was only on the local channels.

 

[Foxbat]

Ah, how quickly they forget... The was brought up in one of the Chats a long time ago. When Dish started to uplink the various Local networks, they had a receiver connected to a filter/pre-processor, and then MPEG-encoded the program before shipping to Dish to be muxed and uplinked. It seems that the signal processor before the MPEG encoder would get "overwhelmed" from time to time and have to reset, at which point the logo for the company that built the processor would appear on screen for about two seconds. The logo was as GaryPen described it, a pair of overlapping circles.

 

[DishSatUser]

While Dish was waiting for fiber optic connections for their local point of presence (POP), they used OTA for those locals packages.

You don't see those now due to the completion of the fiber runs to their POP's in each locals region. Any "new" locations that are setup that don't have a direct feed to Dish's POP in that region will most likely have the same setup for the short term.

 

[GaryPen]

Thank you Mr. Fox. So, this was Dish-specific after all. I knew I had never seen it when watching cable or OTA at that time.