OTA channel rescan day???

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No, some channels are just changing frequencies.

So, if you use OTA TV, you'll need to have your tuning device simply rescan after the switchover occurs.
 
Are people really this thick?

"Where'd it go? It must be gone!"

Computers are smart, you just have to give them the "go" button.
 
The FCC sold another block of channels? They’ve done it four times now. They sold 70-83 for cellphones in the ‘80s. I could hear analog phones on old TV’s after that. They sold off 52-69 after the digital changeover in 2009. That became LTE for mobile data.
 
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Originally Posted By: eljefino
Are people really this thick?

"Where'd it go? It must be gone!"

Computers are smart, you just have to give them the "go" button.


Hold on a second here! Since you think you are a genius, please tell me why OTA channel rescan takes hours on a typical tuner? Also since the station already advertised that they are moving to channel (e.g.) 12.234 why doesn't a tuner allow me to enter that number directly rather than it having to re-scan and taking hours to do it. AND then I have to spend more hours to delete all the junk channels that it finds?

See, you just got me started on this and it is all your fault!!

Seriously, that whole design seems to have been made with the sole purpose of driving me nuts.
 
Originally Posted By: Vikas
Since you think you are a genius, please tell me why OTA channel rescan takes hours on a typical tuner?

Hours?

I just checked one of my TVs - it took 1.5 minutes.
 
I guess my TVs are old. It takes at least an hour on two different TVs. And what about my point of having to get rid of the hundreds of shopping channels that it finds?
 
Mine is a 3-year-old Samsung and it takes about 30-35 minutes. I get a ton of channels at my current place but at my previous place where I would get 2 or 3 that I could watch, would take less than 5 minutes.
 
I think the point I was trying to make as an engineer is what is underlying reason why a gigaflops CPU inside that tuner takes hours to do something which should take no more than a full minute? This seems to be deliberately made it run extremely slow. Your OEM car radio scans a band and stores best stations in few seconds at most.

I also recall that scanning in analog world when cable tuners started appearing on TV sets was very quick. There has to be dirty politics involved to make the ATSC tuners so annoyingly slow to scan.
 
I hear ya. These are all valid questions that I'd like someone to answer for us.

The only thing I can think of is that up until recently with the advent of smart TVs, most TVs had pretty weak chipsets, and maybe the digital TV spectrum is much more vast than the FM spectrum that your car radio tuner has to deal with. The digital TV has channels and subchannels, almost like an entire separate frequency range for each channel. Still, for this scan to take hours is inexcusable.
 
Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
Originally Posted By: Vikas
Since you think you are a genius, please tell me why OTA channel rescan takes hours on a typical tuner?

Hours?

I just checked one of my TVs - it took 1.5 minutes.


My Kuro Elite takes several minutes, but it's a 2008 model. Hours? Crazy.
 
Im clueless, 5 TVs in my house, I can rescan in minutes, heck, by the time it takes to start one scan on one TV they would be done faster then I can start the scans on all the TVs :eek:)
 
Originally Posted By: Vikas
Originally Posted By: eljefino
Are people really this thick?

"Where'd it go? It must be gone!"

Computers are smart, you just have to give them the "go" button.


Hold on a second here! Since you think you are a genius, please tell me why OTA channel rescan takes hours on a typical tuner? Also since the station already advertised that they are moving to channel (e.g.) 12.234 why doesn't a tuner allow me to enter that number directly rather than it having to re-scan and taking hours to do it. AND then I have to spend more hours to delete all the junk channels that it finds?

See, you just got me started on this and it is all your fault!!

Seriously, that whole design seems to have been made with the sole purpose of driving me nuts.


I'll preface this by saying I worked in tv 17 years and am happy to be out!

Stations used to brand themselves by their channel. Cable came along and channels 2-13 pretty much stayed in their spots on cable, barring fisticuffs between the station management and cable. So that didn't matter.

Then cable started moving stations around so we got branding like (City of license's)NBC so people wouldn't get hung up on a channel.

ATSC was on the horizon so included in the spec was a virtual channel. Even worse there were two transmitters operating simultaneously for the transition time. One could be on the frequency channel 43 and the other on analog 51. When you'd engage a tv to scan it would look for an analog signal then a digital one in the same space. For branding purposes ATSC lets one give a virtual channel number to that 43 frequency so you could call it 51-1, 51-2 etc. When there were still analog signals I'd channel-up and hit 51 then 51.1, 51.2.

I would only assume when the tv slows down it's on a marginal frequency where there could be something but it's not really sure. At least I see mine struggle.

The junk channels pay bills. One transmitter just got sold in my market and how has six Ion subchannels, 3 of which are shopping. They suck! It's like you have to hang a mailbox to get your tax return but there's all sorts of junk mail that comes along for the ride.
 
Originally Posted By: Vikas
I think the point I was trying to make as an engineer is what is underlying reason why a gigaflops CPU inside that tuner takes hours to do something which should take no more than a full minute? This seems to be deliberately made it run extremely slow. Your OEM car radio scans a band and stores best stations in few seconds at most.

I also recall that scanning in analog world when cable tuners started appearing on TV sets was very quick. There has to be dirty politics involved to make the ATSC tuners so annoyingly slow to scan.



My tablo takes <5mins I get around 35 channels.
 
I rescan every six months or so. In the Austin area, they are constantly adding weird channels to the OTA spectrum.

I get around 30 channels, some are all 70's game shows, some are westerns, some are mexican audio only broadcasts, and a bunch of other weird stuff.

I have a cheap $200 50 inch Changhong LED tv in my living room it takes under 5 minutes to scan. I have an even cheaper insignia 40 inch in the bedroom, it takes the same amount of time.
 
Originally Posted By: MoneyJohn
Mine is a 3-year-old Samsung and it takes about 30-35 minutes. I get a ton of channels at my current place but at my previous place where I would get 2 or 3 that I could watch, would take less than
5 minutes.


I just did a scan with my new TV because they turned off one of the channels.

But anyways mine has 2 parts. First it does an antenna scan (1 min) then it does a cable scan (7 min total). I got 26 channels...total. Maybe cancel the cable scan.

Not sure what the cable scan is for either?
 
Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
Originally Posted By: Vikas
Since you think you are a genius, please tell me why OTA channel rescan takes hours on a typical tuner?

Hours?

I just checked one of my TVs - it took 1.5 minutes.

Me too, takes less than a couple minutes.
 
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