In article ,
msg wrote:
Brenda Ann wrote:

snip

I had never seen TV skip until I was 19.. when I was watching local channel
2 (KATU) in Portland and over the span of a couple minutes I ended up
watching the news on CKCK channel 2 in Regina, SK, Canada. RF is black
magic..

One thing that I will most most after the DTV transition is VHF TV skip;
I still have (nighttime) dreams about TV skip. I imagine that the
signal management controls in DTV rcvrs will simply disable display when
confronted with skip. Any thoughts?

There's been some discussion in the DTV groups (alt.tv.tech.hdtv,
alt.video.digital-tv).

There's a threshold effect in the reception, so if the skip is stronger
than the normal transmission by that amount, I'd expect that will be
what you get. If the tuner were too picky, people who get marginal
reception wouldn't get anything at all.

Turns out that you can park your set or converter box on a channel,
a lot of the units will pick up the PSIP(?) channel data and save it
in the channel table, so you get an automatic ID. About a third of the
local (Seattle) stations are hopeless for me to get reliable reception.
But if I know their RF channel, I can set my converter box until a
plane or ship goes by and pull the channel ID out of the ghosts and
check later to see what subchannels they have running. (Hmmm, PAX and
the Sportsman's Channel, well, no loss).

Lightning and other impulse noise are bad news for ATSC, so most
of the stations didn't stay on low VHF, where it's the worst.

Mark Zenier
Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)