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• (December 12, 2010, 01:23 pm)

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[i4tas]

anyone else loose signal durring the packer game for about 3 minutes.  I had no signal at all

[Jam Pro]

I've experienced very poor quality digital transmission of NFL games on the Fox network for as long as I can remember.  This was the case when I was in Chicago, as well as in Madison.  Fox NFL football coverage is third rate at best.

There are some telltale signs of where in the chain the signal is going bad.  For example, some local stations put their own "bug" (the little logo in the corner of the screen).  If the picture breaks up, but the bug remains stable, that's a sign that the problem is happening before it reaches the local station.  This kind of thing is a good thing to look for before complaining to your cable company, BTW.

[i4tas]

it was an over the air problem and I lost all signal on ATSC 11, it wasn't a National problem because i checked satellite.  I just find it wierd that the signal would go away for a while.

[Jam Pro]

The local Fox affiliate may well have gone off the air, or something else happened to make their signal not displayable.  For today's game (also on 47-1) I'm getting a corrected error rate of >1000/sec. and over 27,000 uncorrected errors in less than 3 hours that I've been tuned into the game.  That's a couple of orders of magnitude worse than I've seen with other Madison stations with the same antenna setup.

It's pretty rare to lose a transmitter altogether, but not impossible.  But it could be a propagation problem too.  If that wasn't the only outage that you've seen on 47.1, or you get picture and/or sound breakups fairly often, then you might want to experiment with antenna placement etc.  OTOH, if you have a live network feed...

[Jam Pro]

Well it happened again this week, and it was a network problem without a doubt.  Fox couldn't even manage any kind of feed for the kickoff of the Packers/Arizona game.  The first quarter-hour was filled in by extending the Vikings post-game show, showing the Favre interview and other things one more time *yawn*, and padding it with advertising.  Then we got three minutes of a black screen, followed by nearly ten minutes of SD programming (presumably a backup feed).  After a brief trip to the increasingly familiar "FOX NETWORKS" color bars, the "full" 720p* HD feed finally returned.  That's nearly a half hour out of a three hour show that was botched at the network level.  Sad.

* Although 720p isn't really "full HD", it's considered by some to be better for sports programming, because of the fully interlaced frames.  IME there is some truth to this.  OTOH, with full-HD sets that can bob, weave and oversample a 1080i29.97 signal into an interpolated 1080p119.88 or 239.76 picture, the argument for 720p over 1080i is fading.

Does anybody out there know what's going wrong at Fox?  It's not limited to their sports units; I lost nearly an hour of a two-hour "Dollhouse" 2-hour special to poor signal conditions...and many minutes of color bars.  Does anybody at WMSN-DT want to step up and explain?  Does anybody use this site any more?  Or is it that, now that "the transition" date has passed, nobody thinks there's anything more to talk about?

[i4tas]

yea it was a network feed problem.  I saw the same problem on WITI FOX 6 in milwaukee.

[Jam Pro]

It looks like the network feed problem is something endemic to the Fox Network.  I did some research, and found that they're playing around with IPTV in the worst possible place to try it.  I've also found a lot more recordings of prime-time Fox Network programming with serious corruptions.  I guess that Fox can let quality control slip in a big way while they're #1 in the ratings, but it's a shame no matter what.  OTOH I make a good living replacing POS "turnkey" systems like this, so I can't complain! 

To make a long story short, Cisco (the computer network equipment maker) is dying (literally!) to expand into emerging markets like VoIP and IPTV.  They bought Scientific Atlanta (maker of cable boxes mostly), and threw together a bunch of off-the-shelf Cisco & Scientific Atlanta components, with a common desktop PC running Windows and Scientific Atlanta's ROSA software as the weak link, and sold it for some outrageous price to Fox, who obviously didn't know better.  What a mess!!!

Since Charter can't get the time of day from the NFL (still), I went direct-broadcast satellite.  So I don't have to rely on WMSN or Fox next season...or for the Superbowl for that matter.    The few prime-time shows that air on Fox can be purchased corruption-free for a buck an episode, which is fine with me.  Life is good!