I volunteered to help the local translator association with a problem. For 50 years they picked up a set of TV channels from a 120 mile away major city with little real problems from a hill near town, but with the digital transition (are we still in transit?) things have not been so good. With a few new antennas things got better, but there are still problems and I thought I might post and see what folks say and think.
The problem is bad on signal from ch 7--about 175MHz digital--every day or two someone has to drive up the hill and unplug the convertor box to reset it. I/We think the problem is a software glitch that shows up when the signal get corrupted either by ducting from other digital TV source on the same channel and/or by "static" from arcing or other powerfull interferance.
I've done a site inspection at the site and a few other hills to see what I could see. The most interesting things I've seen are a couple of really beat-up C band mesh dishes (ice falling from the towers seems to go right through or punch out panels) and I received a digital channel on the same channel as one of the translator's TX channels---that really argues that the digital signal is pretty robust if it can be received with a strong signal on the same ch. Now, conditions are not what they were 50 years ago at the site--there is another city not that far away that has lots of signals on the air, and the town the translators serve has grown and sprawled--not right around the TX site, but not that far either.
Any thoughts? It is not going to be fixed with a new antenna---the other signals do OK--not great, but good enough though they too seem to need reset every now and then. It could just be the brand of convertor box--they are not standard consumer ones, but that does not mean that they are not closed source and with unknown testing standard (think windows98 blue screen) before release. (Don't ask about my thoughts on convertor boxes and TVs that do both analog and digital and the lack of info on how they work--I'm tempted to tear into my TV or take apart the convertor box I have much like I've reversed engineered STBs for sat use).