I got my box from a friend to blog about my experience with DTV. I had trouble the first day with trying to get good reception, because my apartment didn’t have an antennae connection. I used a homemade antennae that was provided to me. It took me a while to find a place for the anntennae that would get the best reception. If the anntannae wasn’t just right, the t.v. would occassionally freeze, and you could see the picture pixels.
I changed the channels and noticed that each channel would have different subchannels. For instance, there would be 4 different channel 9s. Some channels were clearer than others. The spanish channels were very clear, as were the regular channels below channel 9. KQED, the PBS station, didn’t have DTV until after 5 p.m. when I tried it at 4:30 p.m. Yesterday I watched Judge Judy for the first time in many years and she turned out to be pretty good and fair at judging a case. Last night I watched two programs clearly: a program on global warming and its effects on Africa and Asia; and a program about a wealthy family who found out, to their chagrin, that their family wealth was based on an ancestor who profited from the slave trade.
A few more observations. In most of the channels, I notice that many of the t.v. programs didn’t fill the whole t.v. screen. The shows would either be more of a square with black borders around it, or it would be like a featured movie and be more elongated, with black borders at the top and the bottom of the picture. The quality, as far as I could see, seems to be clear. I have an older t.v., so I can’t say how others quality would be if they used DTV. My big gripe with this DTV experiment would be that some channels didn’t come out clearly, but I’m wondering if the primitive anntennae that I used was part of the problem. Other channels were fine however.
