ATSC 3.0 OTA Television

As an on-again, off-again radio and TV DXer I really wait for weather inversions for OTA. And then the chase is on.

Because of the terrain, I might get channels 7 and 9 here in the DC area, which are still on VHF HI channels, the rest are on old UHF frequencies which don't carry well here at all without some serious atmospheric help. This, even with a high-gain, highly directional, well-pointed TV antenna.

To me, good signal scanning and updating is the key over picture resolution, and HD (if even used) is good enough. I can't imagine 4k being used OTA and working right.

Anyway, I have one Sanyo that does incremental scanning to update newly available channels/subcarriers whcih is excellent, but doesn't show guide info as part of it's firmware. I also have an LG that doesn't scan as good, but reads/displays the underlying meta data to display what you're watching real well.

Then you have the DirecTV ATS add-on tuner (it used to be built-in, but the stopped that), which is fairly sensitive, but it's highly dependent upon the tuning data they provide. It will only scan for what it thinks is available and has guide data for in a specific market.

For example, we used to have the MHz Network (whcih I used to love) spread over two transmitters in the area (Goldvein - real close to me, and Fairfax) but the operator of those transmitters sold them ove the summer. DTV still has guide data for them and thinks they're still there. When they did have it right, they could never get the subcarriers right, so you couldn't tune most of them... They currenty have one of 7's 4 channels (TBD) completely unlisted, which is a shame. Absolutely awful way of doing things.