Sudden Missing OTA Channel

[chsscgas]

I came home on Thursday to find that the OTA channel I had tried to use to record the ACC Basketball Tournament was gone. I was still receiving all the other OTA channels.

I thought it was an issue with the broadcaster but after posting and checking the local HDTV AVS Forum board no one else was having trouble.

I re-scanned for OTA channels and TiVo mysteriously started displaying it.

Anyone else have this issue? I searched this forum but could not find any other mention of this.

Thanks!!

[phox_mulder]

Originally Posted by chsscgas

IAnyone else have this issue? I searched this forum but could not find any other mention of this.

Yes, more than a couple times with one particular station.

For some reason, they either had their HD channel turned off during the day,
or their PSIP turned off during the day.
One or the other would get turned back on right before primetime started, it was a crapshoot whether or not the S3 could record from it.

Once it tuned to it and it wasn't there, it would mark it as not there and I'd have to rescan to find it.

I complained in the local AVS forum, and an engineer from that channel explained what was going on, and what they were doing to rectify it, and it's been pretty good ever since.


phox

[chsscgas]

I went to watch Letterman from Tuesday and Wednesday and found a recording of 0:00.

Switched to live TV to find the "Channel not available" message for the OTA in question.

Scanned OTA channels again and it is back working. I added the OTA antenna since I was having cablecard issues to give me some assurance I could shows on CBS.

Now I don't know what to do.

Any ideas?

Thanks!!

[phox_mulder]

I've had this happen to my WB station on more than one occasion.

It seems they were having PSIP problems, so they were losing the channel mapping, instead of being on 30-1, they were on 48-3.

If the S3 tries to record on a channel that isn't there, it removes it from the channels it can receive, and needs a rescan to be able to put it back, or something like that.
Or, the S3 checks at various times during the day for active chanenls, and if it can't find one, it removes it, requiring a rescan to put it back.

For a while, I was double recording on Thursday nights, SP's for Smallville and Supernatural on 30-1,
and a manual 2 hour recording on 48-3 for a backup.

It seems to have calmed down lately.
Don't know if the station rectified the problem, or a S3 software update fixed it.


phox