Teleidoscope

Tue, Jan 16, 2007

HDTV

Posted at 10:18 pm MST to Technology

I live a couple of miles from anywhere with cable TV hookups and it would cost the cable company too much to run cables to our little scattered neighborhood of a dozen houses. On the other hand, I'm on a ridge close to the Boulder rock formations called the Flatirons. If I try to watch Denver stations over the air, I get a ghost for each Flatiron.

For several years I used a microwave TV service, but it didn't have very many channels (and none of the local ones) and the connection was pretty flaky. Once the local channels became available from the Satellite dishes, I upgraded to a fairly high-end DishNetwork system.

In 2002 just before I began spending most of my time on the road I upgraded my TV to a big Mitsubishi, and upgraded some of my other AV components to support it. Ironically, my satellite dish receiver which was a high-end model, died as I was re-cabling the AV stack, so my fancy high-end system ended up including a base model Dish receiver I picked up in a hurry at Costco. The base model unit didn't work with the VCR nearly as well as the better model it replaced, which was annoying.

But it was just temporary... then I started spending a lot of time out of town.

A couple of weeks ago, the Dish system started getting really flaky. Some of it was high winds rattling the dish and messing up the focus, but I think most of it was the receiver starting to fail. Last week the sound started to fade out almost completely, but only from the dish signal -- the DVD player and radio tuner sound were fine.

Upgrading to the HD involves replacing both the receiver and the dish, and HD is becoming more common, so it seemed the equipment had decided it was time for a change.

My new toy was delivered and installed this evening. My TV turns out to be sort of borderline HD, despite the HD 1050i on the front: I'm going to need some new cables and a bit of tweaking of the settings to get the full effect.

But it's nice to have good sound and a stable picture, after what I've been dealing with for the past month... and an excuse to play with techie stuff.

I got the high-end receiver: it can do picture in picture or drive two different TVs. (I'll eventually run a line to the bedroom TV.) It also has a built-in digital video recorder (like a Tivo).

So I should be able to record the shows I want to watch while I'm away next week without needing to try to sync the timers on the dish receiver and a VCR. Naturally, now that I have the new toy, I'm going out of town again. At least it is only for a week.

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