No longer receive one channel on one TV

Mike4565 · 2-Feb-2015, 3:56 PM

Hello from Denver. Thanks to your help in the past, we've had great success receiving all local OTA HD broadcasts, using a Winegard FlatWave antenna to capture the signals, and send them through a Channel Master booster to several TVs throughout the house. Suddenly, however, one of those TVs, a Philips, no longer receives the local PBS channel 6.1, as it once did, displaying a message that "no program is available" on 6.1 only. All the other TVs still receive 6.1, with what appears to be a good signal. I ran the channel autoinstall program on the problem set, with no luck. Why might this one TV no longer receive just one channel it did previously, a channel the other sets still receive just fine? If this is a repair issue, what might it cost? How should I proceed? Thanks for your help...
Mike

GroundUrMast · 2-Feb-2015, 6:05 PM

Try moving the problem TV to a location that is served by the shortest cable run. The tuner may be less sensitive than the other TVs or the cable run that serves the problem TV may have a fault of some sort (bad connector(s), crushing, kinking, puncture, moisture intrusion, etc.).

Perform a full rescan of the problem tuner... Disconnect the antenna, then run a full channel scan. Unplug the TV and leave it for 30 min or more. The reconnect the power and antenna, run another full channel scan.

Mike4565 · 4-Feb-2015, 1:01 AM

I was standing in front of the problem set with a wrench in my hand to disconnect the antenna, and decided to first check one more time to see if 6.1 might have decided to return home. It had. Don't know why it went missing from just this one set, nor certainly why it's now back, but I'll take it despite the uncertainty. Thanks again for your suggestions - I'm glad to have them in case they're needed in the future.

Mike

GroundUrMast · 4-Feb-2015, 1:52 AM

The station may have made a minor change to their multiplexing equipment in error or intentionally. If so, and if they backed the change out, the problem as seen on your end would have gone away. Most TVs can figure out some of the minor changes made by the broadcaster, some TVs firmware is less able and will require a rescan to figure out how many programs are available on a given real channel and what the virtual channel ID(s) are.

Glad it's working for you.

tomfoolery · 4-Feb-2015, 4:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GroundUrMast

The station may have made a minor change to their multiplexing equipment in error or intentionally. If so, and if they backed the change out, the problem as seen on your end would have gone away. Most TVs can figure out some of the minor changes made by the broadcaster, some TVs firmware is less able and will require a rescan to figure out how many programs are available on a given real channel and what the virtual channel ID(s) are.

As an interesting (to me) aside, two new sub-channels showed up in the last year (Grit-TV and Get-TV), piggy-backed onto existing channels of course. They weren't on the channel list in the setup menu until they suddenly were, and I hadn't done any rescans since well before that. So apparently my Panasonic plasma will detect and add a sub-channel on it's own. Perhaps not all do, and perhaps if the station changes something and one of the OP's three tvs can't self-adjust, it would explain what happened. That's a lot of 'perhapses', though.