Antenna and DIGITAL TV. HELP

[flying dog]

I live in a block of units.

 

COMMON ANTENNA.

 

It is UHF/VHF, but dunno if it is Digital compatible.

 

We also have a Mast head amp/splitter.

 

Obviously it is for "analogue" TV. When digital happens, will we have service or do we need to update/change the amp/splitter?

 

Ringing the "help line" is a total waste of time as it is a "press 1 for....." kind of thing and there is no "Speak to a person" option.

 

 

[fly_tornado]

wow, you still have analogue! install google on that TV with the keyboard

 

 

[Zibi]

As far as I know there is no difference between analogue and digital antennas. It's still the same frequencies and it should work fine.

 

There may be problems if your analogue signal was weak, as with analogue transmissions you can still get a picture with weak signal, whereas with digital it's either great quality or nothing at all.

 

 

[MarcK]

Call a company called match master give them your location and they will let you know what you need. Those guys manufacture tv antennas. They have helped me out once or twice.

 

 

[kgwilson]

As far as I know there is no difference between analogue and digital antennas. It's still the same frequencies and it should work fine.

There may be problems if your analogue signal was weak, as with analogue transmissions you can still get a picture with weak signal, whereas with digital it's either great quality or nothing at all.

Correct though on days with good atmospheric conditions it may be OK but poor, blocky, or no reception at other times. The only thing the antenna supplier can do is improve the signal with bigger or better signal reflectors & a quality balun & mast head amplifier. They call them digital antennas but the signal is received in either VHF or UHF wavelengths & decoded into digital format by the TV tuner or set top box.

 

 

[rankamateur]

whereas with digital it's either great quality or nothing at all.

Served us well since TV was introduced but now we get nothing from our old station, pain in the butt, all we get is a bit that seeks in from queensland. Different time zone, never get to see the news. My old man put a free to air satellite system in, it gives you TV but only filler music were the ads should be which is worse than listening to the ads played 15 dB above the show you were watching and local news is a joke on satellite. I hope Juliar got plenty of dough for the bandwidth she sold off to the phone companies. The chinese TV manufacture companies and harvey norman were the only winners.

 

 

[flying dog]

Quote 1:

 

As far as I know there is no difference between analogue and digital antennas. It's still the same frequencies and it should work fine.

 

Quote 2:

 

I hope Juliar got plenty of dough for the bandwidth she sold off to the phone companies.

 

I know I am stupid - told many times every day - but.....

 

If they are using the same frequencies, HOW was "bandwidth" sold off?

 

Eats another stupid pill.

 

 

[Guest Andys@coffs]

Both are over simplifications.

 

Digital is entirely mainly within the UHF frequency spectrum. If your previous analogue stations were in UHF then likely that the frequency is the same (at least for one of the possibly many transmitters) . If however your analogue TV was in lower VHF channels then in digital it will likely have relocated to a UHF frequency or a VHF channel above 5.

 

Is this an issue? No, in the old days you had to know the channel number of your TV station and that translated to a frequency. Digital has a channel number that is encoded in the datastream but it has nothing to do with the frequency. Bottom line new telly, menu/picture/find everything.... It may well find ABC channel 21 on 5 different TV repeater stations that all transmit on different frequencies but because it see's 21 in the data stream knows they are the same. Chooses the one with best reception and uses that by default, only choosing one of the others if it for what ever reason it's sub standard on the day..... As an aside where I am there are 4 separate transmitting stations visible to my antenna so if you can see the raw channels, which are visible on a PC based TV system then like me you may have close to 100 actual channels in use. Windows Media Player sometimes gets the choice of the most appropriate channel wrong and it can break up something terrible compared to a real TV using the same masthead/antenna system. If you dig into the depths of the system you delete all the channels detected from transmitting locations that are always much worse quality than the preferred station location and that then fixes it....more is not always better.....

 

so all that aside and to the original question, will the antenna do the job? Yes if its a UHF antenna, or a UHF/VHF antenna (The really big elements make good bird landing areas but will do nothing for the telly). If its a VHF only antenna then you'll need a new one.

 

How do you tell the difference, UHF antenna elements are about 20cm across, VHF in excess of a metre. As long as you have lots of 20cm elements your probably fine (Don't take the number literally I haven't measured then it may between 15 and 30 cm but if you cant tell the diff between that and +1m then time to turn in your RAAus certificate.

 

Andy

 

<EDIT> Sorry misspoke the Entire VHF band hasn't been ditched just the low frequency channels (0 through 5) However the reality is that the UHF band has much greater frequency available and therefore much of the channels (frequency not TV Number) available are in the UHF Band. The 1+m width of the VHF antenna's was necessary for the low down frequencies and in fact if you look carefully at a VHF Antenna you'll see that its actually a folded dipole with 2 separate folds, the widest for the low down frequencies that have been ditched and the closer in smaller (but still bigger than UHF ...about 60cm from memory) is used for thoase places that have a VHF digital channel in use. In fact here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_and_New_Zealand_television_frequencies you can see in the tables that the higher VHF frequencies provide nationally 226 channels of the 1497 channels allocated. for those in cities and larger regional areas, I would be very surprised if you couldn't get everything you need from UHF alone

 

 

[flying dog]

Thanks AndyS

 

 

[rankamateur]

Quote 1:As far as I know there is no difference between analogue and digital antennas. It's still the same frequencies and it should work fine.

 

Quote 2:

 

I hope Juliar got plenty of dough for the bandwidth she sold off to the phone companies.

 

I know I am stupid - told many times every day - but.....

 

If they are using the same frequencies, HOW was "bandwidth" sold off?

 

Eats another stupid pill.

Sorry, we didn't have UHF since TV was introduced, but we did get sound and pictures! We get neither now that the VHF bandwidth has been liberated for sale to pad out 4G and stuff the people who now own illegal cordless microphone PA systems.

 

 

[Powerin]

FD, we've had only digital for a couple years. Ours are on Hi VHF frequencies (channels 7-12) and I think Sydney's are too. I didn't need to upgrade anything and I have splitters, an amplifier (which I probably don't need any more) and 20 year old coax. We are not in a strong signal area. You should have no trouble at all if you currently receive your analogue channels OK. However, digital is pretty sensitive to electrical interference so your mileage may vary. If your building antenna system ends up to be inadequate surely you will have enough angry tenants that the landlord will upgrade.

 

Failing that, and if you are even just a little bit handy, try building one of these antennas - http://www.tvantennaplans.com/

 

I built one out of farm fencing wire (similar to wire coathanger), some wood and screws and a balun from Jaycar. I didn't worry about the reflector part. I couldn't be bothered crawling in the ceiling to connect our main antenna to my son's room so tried this one just in case it worked. I just used a bit of coax I had hanging around to connect it up, nothing special. It's mounted on the roof gutter. Believe it or not it works great...and our TV towers are about 100km away.

 

 

[Jabiru7252]

I live in a block of units.

COMMON ANTENNA.

 

It is UHF/VHF, but dunno if it is Digital compatible.

 

We also have a Mast head amp/splitter.

 

Obviously it is for "analogue" TV. When digital happens, will we have service or do we need to update/change the amp/splitter?

 

Ringing the "help line" is a total waste of time as it is a "press 1 for....." kind of thing and there is no "Speak to a person" option.

There is no such thing as an antenna designed for digital TV just like there were no antennas designed for colour TV. Anything a company tells you will be to sell their product. I spent many years in the radio/TV servicing game and the money made flogging colour TV antennas in the seventies to naive customers was astounding. What does get up my nose is the way digital is portrayed as something wonderful - any fool can see that it is hopeless when interference is around. An analog TV by its very nature will mask noise and weak signals (within limits) whereas a digital TV goes stupid with pops and sqeaks and blocky pictures with low levels of interference. And they compress the hell out of the signal giving rise to 'onion ring' effects in dark scenes and crap pictures during scenes with fast movement.

 

 

[Stoney]

Ah the seventies! I remember our first colour TV - it was brown.