Herald: Ch 7 may buy Ch 56
A. Joseph Ross
joe@attorneyross.com
Sat Aug 19 23:34:07 EDT 2006
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
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