Ok crazy question. Moved my antenna to the attic today and did a rescan. I have several channels with two or three multiple entries. No station I’d s noted just the ch number and network I’d. All are 5 green dots. How do I know which one to pick?
Can you do a rescan? And maybe post a screenshot?
I’m a bit tech challenged and don’t know how to get a screen shot with my tablet. But basically I have multiples of 19.1, 19.2, 19.3 and same with the 36’s . Just shows the channel number and network name (no station I’d) so I don’t know which are my primary towers. At this point I just selected the first five Green Dot channel for each. Just wondering if there was a way to know which tower that was.
19.1, 19.2 and 19.3 are the subchannels on channel 19. They will all have different shows. Likely the .1 is HD (that is 720p or 1080i) quality and the .2 and .3 are SD (480p) quality. You can select all 3, or only the main HD one, up to you.
Guess was not very clear in my explanation. What I have since I moved the antenna to the attic is 3 of 19.1, 3 of 19.2, 3 of 19.3, ect. Same with the 36s. Antenna is pointed at towers a little over 30 miles away but I also have a transmitter for these about 5 miles off to the side. Would just like to be able to know which tower was associated with each entry so I could be sure I selected the primary tower. All are five Green Dot so may not matter. I just picked the first 5 green on each one.
These sound like translators. Sometimes a channel will buy a low power station that covers areas that the main transmitter won’t cover.
If so it would be unusual for there to be a primary and 2 translators that overlap. And they would overlap with equal power. You would have to go to the main channel WiKi page and check how many translators they have. Some times translators flash their call letters on the screen.
They sure do sound like low-power translators close to the OP’s house. They would have the same “over the air (virtual)” channel number (ie: 19.2), but more than likely are actually on different actual frequencies. This is very common, and will likely become more common as markets are “repacked” by the FCC. The stations get to keep their market identity (NBC-33) but can be moved to a more convenient real channel number.
Trial and error testing will show you which stations perform best with your antenna and location. Receiving stations “off the side” of the antenna (as opposed in the direction the antenna is pointed) is very common in digital TV reception. These channels may have a higher rate of pixelization, though.
TVFOOL.COM may have information on your market and the translators being used. It’s database may not be completely up-to-date however. When using its data, you want to focus on the stations that is showing as “LOS” at your location. These generally give you consistently good reception.
This is just ‘for example’? Sub channels can have have HD quality as well, although it seems few do.
That’s because each channel (frequency) only has so much bandwidth to share among its subchannels. See the “Technical considerations” here for a table of theoretical combinations of resolutions/bitrates that can fit within the provided bandwidth:
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This unfortunately doesn’t happen in Canada. None of the networks transmit subchannels. And generally all channels come from the only one tower. In Toronto, they all broadcast from atop the CN Tower.
Any towers that repeat channels to other cities are way too far away to ever be picked up by even the best / largest OTA antennas.
My only suggestion is to open a support ticket with directly Tablo Support. They should be able to remote in and see which channels have the strongest signal and / or the real channel numbers rather than the virtual channel numbers. So they can modify your channel list for the “local” transmissions.
The table under “Technical considerations” seem a bit misleading, columns are HDTV channels and Subchannels. It doesn’t appear that ist the actual comparison. The top of the article ATSC > United States “By convention, the suffix position “.1” is normally used to refer to the station’s main digital channel” Implying .2 .3 .4 are supchannels, regardless of HD.
In the table, 7 lines down suggest one 720p main with 720p sub + 480i/p sub
and with further compression (noticeable at times) they can go further
|13-1|ABC|720p|
|13-2|CW|720p|
|13-4|ION|720p|
this is a partial line up from my tablo’s active channels (there is a 13.3 480) WTVG is in the table under Tradoffs (in this table some reference main channel while others refer to first subchannel)
Thanks everyone, I will use a bit of trial and error testing to see which is actually the strongest signal. If I can’t figure it out i will ask Tablo support to remote in and take a look.