General Questions on Plots and Translators
 

I'm curious about a few things:

1. Often times television signals can be received from two different towers. Let's say one from the north is Real Channel 14, Virtual Channel 5, and the one from the NNE for the same station is Real Channel 28, also Virtual Channel 5.

What happens if you are right in the middle and both signals are of equal strength? Doe the TV use the stronger signal and ignore the weaker?

2. For some stations in the plot (especially translators) the virtual number is not there. Does this mean that it's just not in the database? Or that the virtual station number does not apply for this channel and your tuner will only find it on the real channel and not use the virtual channel number?

Thanks for a great site. I check in regularly to learn.

Thanks!

No. It's up to the tuner's software as to how duplicate virtual channels are handled. Most commonly, the tuner simply increments the sub-channel number of the second RF channel so that they are above the virtual channel numbers used by the first RF channel scanned into memory. Some early tuners were found to crash when they ran into duplicate virtual channel numbers.

Correct. TVFool takes its data from the FCC database which rarely has virtual channel info in it. Any other data would have to be added manually which would be expected to be quite time consuming.

You can usually figure out what's on translators by checking rabbtears.info.

My TVs (from various vendors) handle the duplicate VC problem in there own ways. One will keep the sub-channel number but replace the main VC number with the real channel number.

Another TV will have multiple instances of the same VC+sub-channel and when channel surfing, you'll encounter the channels as they appeared in the channel scan. This causes the tuner software to get confused by the use of the UP & DOWN channel buttons. Manual channel input using the number keys is often needed.

I like my SiliconDust HDHR tuners, I can use the real channel number and PID number. Many folks would not agree with me, perhaps thinking that they don't want to memorize the real CH #'s and PIDs. All I can say is that once I learned them, I have no reason not to use them.