Herald: Ch 7 may buy Ch 56

[A. Joseph Ross]

On 19 Aug 2006 at 15:00, Laurence Glavin wrote:

> A few years ago, a friend of mine who was a school teacher and had the
> summers off used to work as a house watcher for owners who went away.
> One of those houses was in Medway or Medfield (I always get them
> confused) and he invited some of us over to use the tennis courts
> (with the owner's ok).  Later in the day, if some of us wanted to
> catch the news on TV, I learned that the town's Cable TV supplier
> placed local over-the-air stations at completely different channel
> assignments.  I suppose if I lived there, I'd get used to it... I
> automatically think og WGBX-TV as being on channel 16 and not 44.. but
> I found it briefly disconcerting to find channels 2 or 4 or 5 out
> among the double-digit assignments.  I never really found out what was
> on 2,4,5  etc or why they did this.
 
I think there actually is a technical reason for this.  I used to see 
this problem a lot more back in the 80s and early 90s than I do now, 
but there is a problem called "ingress," which, as the cable people 
explained it to me, is that if the station is the carried on the same 
cable channel as its air channel, the station's air signal conflicts 
with its cable signal, causing diagonal lines across the picture.  In 
Brookline this seems particularly common on Channel 2.  

Cablevision, which was Brookline's cable company at the time, didn't 
want to move stations to other channels because of the confusion that 
would cause, and over the years, they seem to have improved the 
situation considerably, but I remember a lot of discussions about 
that when I was on the town's Cable Monitoring Committee back then.

-- 
A. Joseph Ross, J.D.                           617.367.0468
 15 Court Square, Suite 210                 Fax 617.742.7581
Boston, MA 02108-2503           	         http://www.attorneyross.com