Buckeye Cable and Fox 36 Saga

As of Sunday, there wasn't a HD antenna to be had in town. Best Buy, Target, Walmart and Meijer were all out. Luckily I got mine on Saturday morning.

It was a big play off weekend. Go 49ers!

I use the net to watch Fox games. There are Euro sites that stream the games for free. Just gotta find the right website :)

I watched every single Patriots game this season from my Sylvania home without Direct TV.

Go Pats!

I found a decent antenna at Rite Aid for $30. Worked well during last week's NFL games.

I have an Archer rabbit ears type from Radio Shack I bought over 12 years ago and it works just fine. Toledo channels come in just as good as they do with cable.

"Won't it be interesting if Buckeye only offered the free antennae to people who asked about them?"

In light of their TV commercial that they have been running where the lady says "For an inexpensive way to watch Fox36, call us" while the picture of an antenna is on the screen, I am not sure what you mean by "only to people who asked."

Should they ship them to 120,000 subscribers whether they want them or not?

I bought my $30 antenna at meijer in pburg just before the SF-GB game last weekend....haven't watched fox since. And won't until the SF-ATL game on sunday afternoon. Wife hasn't made a peep about not having fox, either.....I wonder when WUPW will give in? Doesn't sound like Buckeye will.

I put up an antenna outside two years ago when I got a digital TV for our bedroom, mostly as a backup in case Buckeye went down. When this all started a month ago I added an antenna rotor to see if I could get Detroit stations also. Turns out there are over 20 channels that I receive. I moved the connection to the Family room TV which is on the Buckeye convertor box and did not use the antenna connection on the TV. That made it very easy to run both Buckeye and the antenna.

i tried an antenna a few years ago and had really terrible luck with it. has tech changed much recently, or am i just stuck in a deadzone?

I noticed on the HD antenna that I had to keep moving it around. Even a foot or two difference would make huge difference. One place I’d get channel 11, move it a foot over and then I’d get channels 24 and 36, move it again a few feet and then I’d get channels 38 and 48 (didn’t know they existed).

It took a while for me to get it just right so I could get all the channels. If all I wanted was to get channel 36, it only took me a try or two. Also a s note, I had to get the $70 antenna as I don’t have the room for bunny ears on the cheap ones.

Also - keep having you TV rescan for channels every time you put the antenna in a new place. Don’t assume that you’ll simply plug in the antenna and move it around till the channel shows up. Move the antenna and have the TV auto scan for the channels again.

Yesterday, a friend told me that he had trouble finding an indoor antenna last weekend in some area stores, such as Best Buy and Radio Shack, but he eventually bought a "flat" antenna at Lowe's for $50. Then he also bought a rabbit ears-style antenna for $10 or so at Meijer.

He said that his home had new siding installed in recent years, and some kind of foil-like substance was used.?? Anyway, the flat-style antenna, whatever that is, only worked properly if it was placed by a window. But it worked, and he could watch the football games. But the inexpensive rabbit ears antenna never worked properly, regardless of where it was placed in his house, so it was useless.

I should ask what he bought at Lowe's, but I wonder if this is the "flat" antenna. It cost $49.97 at Lowe's.

RCA Indoor Digital HDTV VHF UHF Tabletop Antenna

I've been watching the NFL on Fox on a portable digital TV with only a 7-inch screen. Good enough for the end of the season. We installed a Roku box recently, so that's our main source of TV watching. I finally watched Helvetica the other night. We'll cancel our basic cable. The only scheduled TV programming that we watch is NFL for me and Criminal Minds for my wife and me. For the local channels, I guess I'll start with inexpensive rabbit ears, and if that does not work, then I'll try something like the $50 antenna above.

The Mohu Leaf antenna gets pretty good reviews in the electronics mags I read. You have to keep in mind that the HD digital signal is line of sight. You either receive the channel or you don't - no gray area so to speak as there was with VHF and UHF.

First a great link http://www.antennapoint.com/ for locations and also http://www.antennaweb.org/Address.aspx for antenna choice. Upso from I remember you live in the OWE so reception should not be a problem. Aluminum siding and other metals (refrigerators ect.) will creat problems, so an outdoor antenna is the way to go. With my new rotor I have found that a few degrees of rotation from the sweet spot will kill the signal, the old analog was more forgiving. I can actually see the TV tower lights at night so aiming the antenna was easy.

Talked to friend - Best Buy has their antenna in stock now. Get them while they last.

Once you get your antenna properly sited, has anyone noticed if the picture quality is any different from the cable picture?

tell me more about the rotor setup you have? thanks for the links!

First you have to know that digital signals are all on the UHF band now. The old antenna that had the big arms on the front were for VHF and the V shaped arms on the back were for UHF. Now all you need is a UHF only. I have this one now http://www.p4c.philips.com/cgi-bin/cpindex.pl?ctn=SDV4310/27&dct=FAQ&faqview=1&refdisplay=ANTENNA_QAC_70426&refnr=0070426&scy=US&slg=AEN that I got from Menards, I don't think it is still made. The rotor is this one http://www.amazon.com/RCA-VH126N-Antenna-Rotator-Remote/dp/B002GSG0CG from Menards, $69. cheaper than Amazon. I just side mounted on the peak with a 3 foot mast and ran the wires down the side and into the house. The picture quality is perfect in full HD and about 10 seconds sooner than Buckeye and minutes sooner than Dish. We were watching a Nascar race and called a friend (with Dish) about a crash and it had not even happened at his house. Good way to win some bets.

The antenna is better than wire. There is no compression. Depending on your TV, you might not notice.

I used to be in the TV business. Then I worked in CATV for years. Then was the custom designer of systems that integrated cable, antenna and cctv. All jobs of my youth.

There is some good and bad info on this thread in regard to antennas. I'm not gonna jump into the detail, like which antenna is really uhf and which is really vhf and who broadcasts on which. I can say that in many cases, you can use what you already had, so that kind of detail is of little practical use. In Toledo, unless your house is a Faraday cage, you can probably use a coat hanger.

But I will add this to the discussion: A handy tool to see where the antennas are and what is recommended for your location based on your zip code.

http://www.antennapoint.com/antennas/show?id=43614&commit=Search

at one point didn't wlmb and wtol have the two strongest signals? Or am I really mixing up things here?

SensorG absolutely true, I forgot that point. The reception with an antenna is as good or slightly better than Buckeye. justread, for simplicity the old antenna were combo units and the basic design I explained are true. Now days the designs are way beyond the old styles, it all boils down to the distance you need to pick up. I can see the towers at night so did not need the "best" and can get all the Detroit stations except channel 50 and Canada. The days of using a coat hanger are long gone with digital signals. Good link I should have thought of it... no wait I did

I'm sorry to have re-posted it.
Was multi-tasking and skimmed past it. :)

Over the air HD should be the equivalent or slightly superior to cable version. Buckeye does not compress their HD channels at all (you get 1920×1080, 15-16 bitrate)so it is visually as good as over the air.

I swear my HD antenna looks better than my cable.

It likely does. While there may be no compression employed by Buckeye, you are most certainly getting some degree of degradation that is inherent in cable.

Goddamnit, there is no such thing as an HD antenna.

^^^I'm with you ... love my HD antenna

Goddamnit, there is no such thing as an HD antenna.

That might very well may be true, but they package themselves as HD TV antennas so that's what I called it.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/TV-Video-Accessories/TV-Antennas/abcat0107004.c?id=abcat0107004

How true, How true.. advertising hype. Molsonator, the antenna point website (see above) has all the transmitter power specs. You can see them there

I can confirm.. I received a free antenna at Buckeye at Sylvania/Douglas. You have to confirm name and phone number...

:: rolls eyes ::

1) Digital TV, be it 8-VSB broadcast HDTV from the TV stations, or QAM64 or QAM256 digital cable, is at least in a MPEG format stream. 8VSB is MPEG-2. QAM is MPEG-2 though some is also MPEG-4.

2) The only real conversion needed at the headend, as far as I know, is to change the 8-VSB modulation received from the broadcaster into QAM format. The data stream itself, being MPEG-2, can be passed through unchanged. I could be massively wrong, though. But in theory they don't need to touch the MPEG-2 data stream, they only change what it's wrapped in.

3) The "some degree of degradation" line would be BS, unless you happen to have signal issues on your span of cable. The only way you'd be able to tell is if you started having the digital picture fritzing out.

4) The net bit rate of 8VSB is 19.39 Mbit/s, the net bit rate of a QAM256 channel 38.8Mbps, so ASSUMING that the 8VSB signal is 100% HD with no sub-channels, the cable company can fit 2 HD channels into 1 QAM256 channel. QAM64 has less bandwidth.

5) What it would take to prove "no compression employed by Buckeye" is to fire up a cable box's hidden diagnostic menu or some such and tune to the channel, see what QAM channel it is on, what other channels are on that QAM channel, and if it's QAM64 and has 2 HD channels, or QAM256 and has 3 channels, there's compression being applied by Buckeye.

6) While the MAXIMUM rate is 19.9Mbit, the effective rate is often lower, because MPEG is compressed already anyway.

(Waits for paulhem or someone even more technical to step in)

An antenna is an antenna, they're operating in the same frequency range as before, the difference in some is design. You get pretty much the same reception with a 1983 outdoor TV antenna as you get with the 2013 model, barring any fancy-ass amplifiers or fractal designs or Monster Cable that actually makes a difference.

So a signal transmitted via cable - through all the hops, weathered, corroded connections experiences no degradation whatsoever??

Damn! Glad to know I'm getting my money's worth from Buckeye's pristine cable path all the way from their transmission point to the HDMI "In" on my TV.

What would we do without your superior intellect AC?

My eyes tell me the HD antenna (Yes I wrote HD antenna!) looks better than my cable.

I don't understand most of what has been written above. Antenna challenged I guess.

But it does piss me off that we cannot get Fox Toledo and they also removed Fox Detroit. Hubby loves Bones and I love football so we are both screwed.

With the money we pay for cable I do not think we should have to spend more to just receive the same while they screw around with service. Does anyone remember this happening on Buckeye before?

You don't understand digital transmission, dumbass!

How about "forward error correction" and "redundant data"?

Digital is not analog. Digital is effectively all or nothing. Either you get enough bits to put up the full picture, or you get "NO SIGNAL".

Analog, you get a picture, but with ghosting, interference, fuzz, etc.

If your digital picture ain't fucking glitching, there's no degradation that you're gonna notice.

(Jesus Christ on a cracker, this is a turnabout for the books, I'm DEFENDING Buckeye Cable!)

But it does piss me off that we cannot get Fox Toledo and they also removed Fox Detroit. Hubby loves Bones and I love football so we are both screwed.

In case your husband doesn't know, full episodes of all the Fox shows are available 8 days after the initial broadcast on fox.com

Bones is one of my favorite TV shows, and that's how I plan to keep up on it until we get Fox back.

(I'm not available to watch it at the normal broadcast time - I usually DVR and watch it later.)

Monday night's episode was the only new one so far since Buckeye stopped getting the signal. They ran reruns through December and early January.

^^yep, what AC said^^ so never buy the high dollar HDMI cables best buy tries to sell you.

I bought my HDMI cables on sale at a drug store for <$10. They work fine.

mom2

Thanks but my husband is computer challenged and thinks it will bite him or something. He is absolutely afraid of the thing.

While not relevant to this thread I feel I have to toss in my experience with U-verse vs antenna. Antenna is noticeably better. Its rare that we do use the antenna but it is a better picture. If AC says that its only in my mind so be it.

Uverse compresses out the ass, because you're shoving TV down a pair of copper wires originally made for 1950s telephone usage.

Think of cable as a four-apartment building where each apartment has its own water main.

Think of Uverse as a four-apartment building where every apartment is on the same water main.

What happens when someone flushes the toilet in the Uverse building? The other three apartments freeze in the shower.

I'm a bit too tired to explain further but it's a matter of Uverse having limited bandwidth and having to squeeze each video stream you tune into vs. cable either having dedicated channels or switched digital video and reserved bandwidth to feed you whatever you tune into. I'm a bit less up-to-date with that tech and the details.

Thanks. Good to know I'm not crazy.

so never flush the toilet when using an HD antenna

AC: Fuck you.

Over.

You're gonna get a Pink Ticket for talking like that, OM.

Are you being homophobic now?
When they went digital they lowered the output wattage of all the stations as well. Yes digital is either you get it or no signal. MPEG is compression, compressing a signal further is pointless.