JayCarter, CTV ironed out their PSIP bugs quite some time ago so at this point you are having to deal with the OTA reception environment of your exact location. Since you cannot put up an outdoor antenna you might want to consider an indoors-located outdoor antenna like a CM4221 or other 4-bay bowtie reflector - this works for some people. If you are DIY'er you might want to put together a similar antenna.

Hey, so I'm looking at an HTPC setup and trying to decide if I should bother with a tuner. I'm on the 19th floor of a downtown highrise facing east. I can get a slightly blurred VHF signal for analog CBC, and haven't really bothered watching anything else. Will OTA work? By line-of-sight, would a few buildings be a dealbreaker?

A monitor without tuner would be much more cost-effective for my planned set-up, but live sports (Hockey Night) are pretty important to me.

Thanks for any input!

Hi kieran1208, being 19 floors up facing east is good - I would assume you'd be fine for the Mt. Seymour Digital OTA signals. You might probably get KVOS-DT from Bellingham too by swinging an antenna like a Zenith Silver Sensor that way.

You can read through our HTPC Forum at this site for ideas on which tuner would best suit you:

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=31

If you keep your costs low with something like a USB 2.0 tuner that you can return for a refund, you wouldn't be taking much of a chance.

I live on the third floor of a rather old (1940s) three-story+penthouse apartment building in the UBC neighbourhood. I suspect that I'm in one of the worst possible situations for OTA reception. My apartment faces southeast into a forest, I'm on a slight north-facing slope, and the view is almost perfectly perpendicular to the direction to Mt. Seymour.

I am prohibited from using an outdoor antenna. The only channel I can watch with any degree of success is CBC, but there are too many dropouts to make it watchable. I am using an Antennas Direct DB-2 and an ATI TV Wonder 600 USB. At this point I'm ready to just return the tuner (can't return the antenna... oh well, maybe I can use it in the future). It seems like OTA TV is a luxury available only to those who can afford houses :(

Hi,

I'm looking into switching from cable to OTA. Yesterday I built a cheap indoor antenna (a simple dipole using 10ga copper wire terminated to coax) to see where things are at. I live at Victoria and 14th and would have a good line of sight to Mt.Seymour if it wasn't for that darn house just north of me! ha ha. I guess an outdoor mount on the chimney would be line of sight.

Anyways, I'm trying to figure out my tv tuner capabilities. I have a 2003 Toshiba CRT 32AF43. The manual doesn't mention an ATSC tuner. However, the remote switches me from "Analog" to "Cable". In Cable mode I scanned the channels and picked up:
2: CBC (I think but the reception is incredibly poor)
8: global (pretty good)
68: victoria (not sure which station, reception was ok)
77: french CBC (pretty good)
83: ctv (pretty bad)
93: omni (watchable)

in analog mode I received channels 2 (cbc, really bad), 17 (A channel? very good reception), and 32.

Does this mean my tv does have an ATSC tuner?

What would be my next step, perhaps add a reflector to the dipole or maybe buy a commercial antenna?

thanks!

It doesn't look like it has an ATSC Tuner

http://www.ciao.com/Toshiba_32AF43_CRT_TV_CRT__10019956

68: victoria (not sure which station, reception was ok)
77: french CBC (pretty good)
83: ctv (pretty bad)
93: omni (watchable)

These are UHF channels that you are tuning in cable mode.
cable 68 = UHF 17
cable 77 = UHF 26
cable 83 = UHF 33
cable 93 = UHF 43

The cable channels and UHF channels are about a MHz or two different from each other, butt the tuners AGC will generally adjust to compensate.

These are the same channels you got in "antenna mode", which is the mode you should be using for over-the-air reception.

It appears that your tuner is not ATSC-capable.

Just to clarify, you have to set your TV to Antenna for OTA, and your TV will get you only the analogue stations from Mt. Seymour, as the others have said.

If you set it on Cable and hook up your antenna you are going to pick up signal leakage: http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=65268

I'm new to the world of HDTV and OTA reception. I would like to purchase a new TV and install an antenna, but before making the commitment is there any way to test whether my reception would be OK? I live in North Van in the Edgemont area, but do not have line of sight to Mt Seymour (blocked by a stand of evergreen trees). Any advice, or experience from viewers in my area? Much appreciated.

Hi DBN and welcome here. Leaving the trees aside for now, if the line of sight to Mt. Seymour would otherwise be clear then I'm thinking that you will be fine for CBC, CTV, and Global in Digital OTA. If there is no line of sight due to mountains then I'm not hopeful.

Now about the trees: if we're talking about a thick stand of firs, spruces, or red cedars then there may be a problem, especially on rainy days, but on the other hand your location is not very far from the transmission antennas so my assumption is that you would be able to regularly lock onto all three stations and probably the 2 Bellingham stations too if you aim that way.

For testing, you would either want to ask a pro like 4DTV HD (see Post #346) for a site survey or else you could get a Zenith Silver Sensor clone from London Drugs and check your reception of the original analogue UHF stations up on Mt. Seymour. If they are somewhat strong I'd take that as a positive sign that the digitals will come in well for you. Hopefully you could return the antenna for a refund if the answer is not good.

Personally I've found in a few spots in the Lower Mainland that if CBUFT 26 analogue (Radio Canada French) is clear at a location then the digitals will also be clear. That's just an observation, not a promise I'd stake money on! :)

Hi DBN,

If you have a laptop, you could also try getting your hands on a USB-ATSC tuner (e.g. http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_hvr950.html) and see what you can get digitally. You can also have a look at Google Earth to check your line-of-site-to-Mt-Seymour to see if you're close. I've been through this thread and have not seen any other postings from Edgemont.

I'm in Lynn Valley with a completely different goal (SeaTac), and am still waiting on Greg (4DTV HD) to let me know when he might be in the neighbourhood and able to do a site survey.

...RobDS

Your replies are much appreciated.

I plan to test my reception as suggested, but I am not sure if I try to receive (for example) CBUT-DT on Channel 58 with a sample antenna, will this be viewable on my current analog TV or do I need to test with an HDTV or laptop?

Stampeder,
There is a wealth of knowledge in the links on your post, so I will go through before posting any more questions. Cheers.

Your analogue TV cannot pick up the Digital OTA stations without an ATSC receiver attached.

Is there any chance of picking up an OTA HD Signal here on the UBC campus?

Fender

Google TVfool and you can get a location-specific projection of receivable OTA stations, including downloadable google earth map overlays. Just looking at UBC in general, most of the campus is questionable. The west and south sides especially are weak as there's a lot of hill, buildings, trees in the way, while the north and east sides are better off. Naturally, the higher up you can go the better off you are. I can make no guarantees without more information, but if you toodle on over to the engineering department you might be able to convince a geek there to fire up an RF-spectrum analyzer and do a campus tour to assess your prospects...

LH

fender, do you have line of sight to Mt. Seymour, or at the very least can you point an antenna to the northeast from where you are at UBC?

In the last several years we haven't had much info about reception at UBC although if you search for madbob's posts at the very beginning of this thread you can see that he didn't have much luck due to the tall trees. Another poster's apartment unfortunately faced west so OTA wasn't an option.

I wouldn't rely on TVFool for Canadian stations. It gets all its information from the FCC and its data for Canadian stations is almost always wrong.

Following on my original analog tv test, I borrowed an hd lcd tv and did a digital test. I connected a quick'n'dirty home made dipole antenna and handheld it my livingroom. Doing this I received 2 HD channels, CBC and one other (I can't remember, maybe it was Global?).

I'm looking at buying a new lcd tv and an outdoor antenna. I guess there is no sense worrying about UHF channels below 14 here in Vancouver - both CBC and Global broadcast above UHF 14. In this respect it looks like a CM 4221 is the way to go. Perhaps I will try and borrow an indoor antenna first. Any other comments or suggestions on this?

Shmish,

The consensus seems to be:

Sure try an indoor antenna, it should be an easy test, but ...
An outdoor antenna will always give better results.

When I did my survey through all the posts in the various threads, I concluded that since the CM4228 had some reasonable VHF (i.e. channel 13 and lower) performance, that for the $30 or $40 difference, if you can handle the extra size/width the CM4228 was highly preferred over the CM4221. IMO the CM4228 is still pretty small for an outdoor antenna, and at ~Cdn$100 you might as well get one of the best UHF antennas around. My experience is I get pretty good low-VHF reception in North Van/Lynn Valley on analog channels 2 & 6 with the CM4228.

You are correct that in the lower mainland the VHF channels are all (currently) analog broadcasts, namely 2-CBC, 6-CHAN, 8-Global, 10-CityTV, 12-KVOS. Who knows what will happen post-Feb-2009 when the US shuts down analog (SeaTac 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13) and whether any of that will get reassigned to digital broadcasts in the high-VHF (8-13) range. But we'll have analog VHF in Canada until Aug-2011.

...RobDS

Yep, channels 9, 11, and 13 will carry Digital programming from SeaTac after the cutover. :)