Herald: Ch 7 may buy Ch 56

[Matthew Osborne]

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

To which, on Sat, 19 Aug 2006 23:34:07, A. Joseph Ross
<joe@attorneyross.com> replied:
  
> 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.

If there's an ingress problem, I can completely
understand why you would resort to an approach like
this if you were a cable company.  However, there are
a few cases I know of where there has never been an 
ingress problem, yet channels were rearranged in a
seemingly haphazard manner.  Here in the
Albany/Schenectady/Troy NY market, the local
CBS/ABC/NBC are on channels 6, 10, and 13.  However,
on cable systems in Saratoga and I believe Glenville
(about 15 miles and 30 miles from the TX site
respectively), they had them on channels 7, 8, and 12.
 And even further out in Gloversville (@ 40 miles + to
TX site) they had them on channels 8, 10, and 12.  I
never understood why on earth these cable companies
did this, as this must've caused incredible amounts of
confusion for viewers.

Also, in Plattsburgh NY a similar situation exists.
There, channels 3, 5, and 22 are on cable channels 2
(5), 8 (3), and 4 (22).  This case might be
explainable by ingress though; I'm guessing in a small
area right around Rand Hill (the WPTZ tower site), as
remote as that area is, they probably have ingress
issues and since their cable service comes out of
Plattsburgh, they have to adjust for it there.

                               Matt Osborne
                               Schenectady, NY


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com