Stupid Powered waste of money Antenna

[Billy Bob Boy]

What A Ripoff these things are. I figure I will shell out the 40.00 for this phillips Powered Hdtv antenna. I get it home and plug it in turn it on Till the lights come on. extend the antenna. and the #'s I was seeing were 70's on local Real Locals in Miami Ft lauderdale. Ok Its EHH!! I took the old rabbit ears(Have you seen this It is a pair that would fit in a hole in the back of the old 13 in tvs and has a flat wire that goes to a adapter to the coax) grabbed a 15 foot rg6 cable and put the rabbit ears out side and up by the dish. And bam 100% signals on all the laurderdale and upper 80s from Palm Beach:eek: I am getting almost 50 Perfect OTA channels with a pair of 5 dollar ears.


I guess you guess that I will be bringing the 40 dollar ripoff back to Circuit city.:rolleyes::);):)

[JimSpence]

I do believe this post should have been in the Happy Hour - General Chit Chat forum. :)

[dswallow]

Try the powered antenna on the 15 feet of coax, placed outside. :)

Anyway, it's not so important to have high numbers; you just want to not have dropouts and the "signal strength" reading you're seeing is really more a "signal error correction" reading. Even two antennas both giving you a reading of 100 could have wildly different signal levels; it's just that the signal is clean enough not to require use of any error correction to recover any of it.

[Billy Bob Boy]

I do believe this post should have been in the Happy Hour - General Chit Chat forum. :)
I do belive your right Sorry. Mods Move If you feel like it!

[Sherminator]

Philips powered antennas are s h one tee at the best of times, the SD one that I purchased couldn't even boost a signal from the local station eight miles away.

[CrashHD]

I am getting almost 50 Perfect OTA channels with a pair of 5 dollar ears.


So, you found a better, cheaper way to do something, when you go to Circuit City, you will get $40 back, and the tone of your post suggests this does not make you happy?

I are confusifyed.

[hmm52]

...Anyway, it's not so important to have high numbers; you just want to not have dropouts and the "signal strength" reading you're seeing is really more a "signal error correction" reading. Even two antennas both giving you a reading of 100 could have wildly different signal levels; it's just that the signal is clean enough not to require use of any error correction to recover any of it.

Could you expand on this? I've been perplexed by the tuning issues I've encountered with an S3 purchased in late January. Out of the box it has tlled occasionally on both tuners (mostly local HDs FiOS), and tiled constantly through tuner 0 on many cable channels in the 7-800MHz range. Previous to the S3, I'd seen tiling on a Toshiba cc Tv only after 1st 8 mo.s with FiOS; still almost never with 3 Sony cablecard tuners in devices built 2005.

In first weeks with S3, Toshiba was also tiling to a lesser extent on locals - in response to FiOS feed as before. Signal strength in diagnostics seemed to indicate too high a level as it swung wildly on locals, peaks of 100. Attenuators could clear this but caused no tune or tiling on other channels. When 2nd card was added, it produced many additional channels in upper frequencies that tiled, had very high uncorrected errors, with SS & SNR values much lower than with tuner 1, same channels. No significant change in 3 months of ownership.

Experience with the Toshiba tiling and swapping/puling out S3 cards altogether led me to the following guesses: While the tuners may well be reacting to flawed signals, the diagnostics values are much more indications of how the signal is being resolved than of the raw feed; this is taking place and read before & independent of the cablecards; and while it may be just an issue of too high a signal level for locals with FiOS, there are many other things besides level which can be wrong with the signal, and weak about the Toshiba & TiVo tuners.

So I would like to know the actual meaning of SS, SNR, RS uncorrected/corrected on the diagnostics screen; what's involved with digital tuning; and what might make the older Sony tuners very robust compared to those of the two Ts. - in 100 words or less.........:)

I've been working with TiVo management folks to sort out my own S3. Promised a new replacement when units with reworked tuners are said to become available in May. I'll report back when I see it.

[dswallow]

Could you expand on this? I've been perplexed by the tuning issues I've encountered with an S3 purchased in late January. Out of the box it has tlled occasionally on both tuners (mostly local HDs FiOS), and tiled constantly through tuner 0 on many cable channels in the 7-800MHz range. Previous to the S3, I'd seen tiling on a Toshiba cc Tv only after 1st 8 mo.s with FiOS; still almost never with 3 Sony cablecard tuners in devices built 2005.

In first weeks with S3, Toshiba was also tiling to a lesser extent on locals - in response to FiOS feed as before. Signal strength in diagnostics seemed to indicate too high a level as it swung wildly on locals, peaks of 100. Attenuators could clear this but caused no tune or tiling on other channels. When 2nd card was added, it produced many additional channels in upper frequencies that tiled, had very high uncorrected errors, with SS & SNR values much lower than with tuner 1, same channels. No significant change in 3 months of ownership.

Experience with the Toshiba tiling and swapping/puling out S3 cards altogether led me to the following guesses: While the tuners may well be reacting to flawed signals, the diagnostics values are much more indications of how the signal is being resolved than of the raw feed; this is taking place and read before & independent of the cablecards; and while it may be just an issue of too high a signal level for locals with FiOS, there are many other things besides level which can be wrong with the signal, and weak about the Toshiba & TiVo tuners.

So I would like to know the actual meaning of SS, SNR, RS uncorrected/corrected on the diagnostics screen; what's involved with digital tuning; and what might make the older Sony tuners very robust compared to those of the two Ts. - in 100 words or less.........:)

I've been working with TiVo management folks to sort out my own S3. Promised a new replacement when units with reworked tuners are said to become available in May. I'll report back when I see it.

I've generally found this site to have some good discussions of HD antenna issues -- things that don't require translation in English. :)

http://www.hdtvprimer.com
http://www.hdtvprimer.com/ANTENNAS/fixes.html

In any event what you describe in how the signal readings behave is the same way they behave under classic multipath problems, so much of it may be out of your control and simply require another generation or two of 8VSB tuners that are able to use multipath to their advantage moreso than current implementations.

[hmm52]

I will check out your posted links. Thanks

Though not in an appropriate thread, my questions were about QAM 256 tuning with cablecards, not 8VSB