DTV in Pittsburgh?

Last year I bought an amplified antenna and a digital converter box in anticipation of the national switch to digital TV in February. Then Congress delayed it to June, which means my antenna warranty will expire a week before the switch. WQED switched on April 1 and I've been getting zilch on channel 13 since then, but maybe I've been looking in the wrong place. According to this list they might be on 38 now, but I'm not getting signal there either. (WQED's web site does not actually appear to have channel information.) I live 2 miles from WQED, but Pittsburgh is a hilly place.

I'm not sure if any other local station has made the switch. (Google is inconclusive.) I just checked signals tonight, and currently I am only getting 2 (CBS), 4 (ABC), 11 (NBC), 47 (Christian), and (weakly) a couple other UHF channels. (There were more signals the last time I did a survey.) So it's not clear whether the equipment I bought specifically for the DTV transition even works. (The antenna claims to be digital-capable.)

If you're in Pittsburgh and are receiving any stations digitally, which ones (station and channel number)?

If anyone has any debugging advice beyond waiting to see if everything goes dark in mid-June, I'm interested in hearing that.

(No, I'm not interested in subscribing to cable.)

Edit: Scanning is not dynamic; you need to explicitly have the converter box re-scan when channels are added/moved. Thanks, all.

random bits

Last week Erik spent the day at the vet's for an ultrasound (everything looks good, they said; awaiting formal report). When I picked him up, the person at the desk asked me to sign a photo release. It turns out that this was their day to take photos of staff members for their web site, and since my vet had made a special trip just to be there for this ultrasound, she asked that Erik join her in the picture. :-) (No, it's not on the web site yet.)

Thanks to those who gave me DTV advice. I had the wrong mental model for the converter box: I was thinking of it as a passive device, like an antenna, when it is more like a cable box. I don't think I'd realized before today that I will have to always set the channel on the box and not the VCR. That makes recording shows more of a hassle, but I watch little-enough TV that it probably won't be a big hassle. Still, one of the reasons I've never been interested in higher levels of cable service (except for B5's TNT year) is that the box displaces the tuner in my VCR, making recording more error-prone. Of course, VCRs themselves are on the way out at this point, so perhaps I should be looking for a DVR that does not involve a subscription service. (Again, don't watch enough TV to justify paying for a service.) I want to be able to program something and mostly forget about it until I'm ready to watch accumulated shows.

We saw Star Trek this weekend. If you don't think about the plot or the science too hard it's a good movie -- which is pretty much the calibration I expect from Trek. I wonder if the reset will lead to more TV shows or if it's just a movie franchise at this point.

Speaking of movies, thanks to osewalrus for passing on I'm a Marvel / I'm a DC (YouTube).

A seasonal note: a different kind of Omer calendar. Y'see, Jews are supposed to count the 50 days from Pesach to Shavuot, each night. Sometimes it's hard to remember, so people have come up with various reminder schemes. This one builds on the near-universal motivational properties of chocolate. :-) (Some commenters compare it to a chocolate Advent calendar. Advent calendars are completely outside my experience; sounds like I missed out on something tasty as a kid.)

Seen in passing, a useful-looking URL to have on hand: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/.

Finally (below the cut due to image size) a cartoon that made me laugh out loud. I didn't particularly expect to find it on Language Log, but I'm glad they posted it so I could see it.
( Read more... )