Those Goofy Handheld pocket HDTVs

Interesting observations, Brooce. I suppose it costs too much to properly shield the electronics.

I have three Part 15 type weather and alarm systems and discovered that I can not have the receivers near each other on my shelf. If I keep them about four feet apart they are OK but all fail if they are closer. I have read that the problem is that such units use regenerative receivers to increase sensitivity and a natural byproduct of this is radiated noise. If the receivers are too close together they interfere with each other.

It would be rather difficult for you to keep your TV away from itself though.

Neil

DTV really does not like interference, especially VHF. Analog was perfect for those little TVs.

When analog TV switched off so did I.

There had already been enough format changes with the disappearance of audiotape, vinyll records, VHS, S-VHS, then all the digital formats that are still changing... I never switched to DTV and never will.

Which brings the question, how many other people quit the game?

Many went to cable TV, and what fools they are to pay so much money for commercial programming, and with prices always going higher many are ditching cable.

Free TV on the internet and free music and movies from the public library is the smart way.

I was about to throw the thing away.

No wonder they don't work well.

The Part 15 Experimental Labs and 

the Esquire thing was an attempt at

humour.

Anyway, in this house if you walk around

with one of these things, the received signal

will not be stable.  Coupling the teeny UHF

antenna on the cable to a bigger UHF antenna

with a reflector and some "tuned" elements

does seem to help, although I'll have to try

more to see if that really is the case.  I am

not equipped to connect that bigger UHF antenna

directly into the little TV itself.  

One of the problems with this little TV is that you

cannot enter an RF TV channel manually.  You have

to run a scan and that wipes out whatever was scanned

previously.  So if you want a certain TV channel and

you cannot get it, you have to go to a high place and hope.

I have actually gone up to a very high area on the other side

of town that faces the nearby mountain where the TV transmitters

are.

By the way, we still have one NTSC TV channel here.  It is an

LPTV, channel 48, and it looks like it is going down the tubes

finantually.  (sp?)  This little TV also receives NTSC.  Last I

looked, the channel 48 was running a blank screen with a

station ID graphic down in the lower righthand corner.  

I became interested in these little HDTVs about 4 1/2 years

ago, when a "freak" storm hit New England on Halloween,

bringing rain, snow, ice, and all of the leaves off of the 

trees.  In Connecticut, 800,000 people were without power.

It was 45 degrees in our house for 10 days.  (And

we were lucky.)  A friend had given me a little "pocket"

HDTV.  Because it didn't seem to work, I thought something

was loose inside.  I took it apart and broke it.

(In the dark.)

I have a few more little comments on this subject.

I'd better get these paragraphs entered before I

mess something up.

Neil, I had read somewhere that devices such as

the ones you mentioned used regen receivers.

What a weird thing.  No wonder they didn't

work if they were close together.  

Very best wishes,

Brooce

Here I was thinking that "esquire" meant "attorney", so I looked it up.

Turns out "attorney" is only one of several meanings, I forget the others, but it's somehing like... a person of "high calling", and you yourself admit hanging on high mountains.

I once knew a movie house named "The Esquire Theater" and saw the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" there.

Actually my lawyer uses the title "Esquire" on his name.

How about "The Esquire Broadcasting Company" ?

The only NTSC station I can get is the one I experiment with on Channel 6, which as of last storm had its antenna blown off the pole. Thus ending all my VHF experiments, all ending in the same fate; Antennas blown off the roof! The only antenna left standing is the Rangemaster off in its own little corner of the yard.

I had one at my parent's house for the 

2 meter ham radio band (144 to 148 MHz.)

At my parent's house 40 years ago.  

Running 1 watt with a Drake TR-22 (ZOW)

it got out all over the place.  

That antenna is built like a rock.

More comments to follow.

(Oh wait, are you talking about the

old ham radio antenna or the Hamilton

Rangemaster transmitter??)

Er. Um

It's the ham radio antenna -  am I right?

Brooce

How are you orienting the antenna?  Most HDTV stations transmit a horizontal polarized signal; some transmit circular or elliptical signals.  Most whip antennas are vertical.  Using a vertical antenna to receive a horizontal signal can be a 30dB signal loss.

Early (and I would assume current cheap) HDTV tuners are not tolerant of multipath interference.  Multipath is when the signal is bounced off something creating a weaker signal that arrives at the antenna at the same time as the main signal (in the analog days multipath caused ghosting).  A hand held HDTV may suffer multipath reception issues where the person holding it is reflecting signal back to it.

I got off cable a while ago, and went with over-the-air TV. It's very much line of sight - even with an antenna on the roof, I could receive stations only 40-50 miles away (the curvature of the Earth is a major factor).  You have to get that antenna up really high to get maybe 80 miles - anything over that is marketing.

Omnidirectional antennas work poorly, probably because of multipath interference.  You need a directional antenna, pointed at the transmitting antenna.

And the sensitivity of HDTV tuners varies wildly.  With the exact same antenna, pointing in the same direction, with one device I might be able to receive a signal, and the other - nada.

Don't forget, this is digital.  You either get the signal, or you don't - nothing in between.  It's not like analog TV where you'll get a fuzzy picture in fringe reception areas.

The nice thing about over-the-air TV is that the quality is much higher than either cable or ADSL, where they over compress the signal to save bandwidth.  But it is really designed for fixed station/fixed antenna use.