Philadelphis PA OTA: Anybody Else Having Issues?

[PeteCress]

Our screen has started breaking up fairly often.

At first, I figured it was probably my PC and MIPs issues with Sage - but then my wife told me she was seeing a lot of breaking up watching direct.

That leaves our antenna system, the antenna farm out above Manyunk, and whatever's in-between.

We've had a lot of wind lately...

Are we the only ones in the area with reception issues?

[willieb]

In Villanova here. I have had issues for 8 months with breakups. Worst on channel 6. But fox and CBS both break up every 5 to 10 minutes. Usually momentarily. I finally switched fully over to a Ceton. Are you having issues on all channels?

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by willieb

In Villanova here. I have had issues for 8 months with breakups. Worst on channel 6. But fox and CBS both break up every 5 to 10 minutes. Usually momentarily. I finally switched fully over to a Ceton. Are you having issues on all channels?

Problem is that we don't watch many channels.

PBS News Hour and Charlie Rose on channel 12 are definitely problematic.

Likewise 23.1 (New Jersey).

OTOH, no observed problems with 6.1 (evening news) or 3.1 (Anderson).

If it were our rooftop antenna, I'd think 6.1 and 3.1 would also be affected... but that's assuming everybody uses the same antenna farm.

[egeller]

Fox 29 just increased the power output of their transmitter in the last two weeks.

I have no idea how that could affect other stations. I'm just sayin'........

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by willieb

In Villanova here. I have had issues for 8 months with breakups. Worst on channel 6. But fox and CBS both break up every 5 to 10 minutes. Usually momentarily. I finally switched fully over to a Ceton. Are you having issues on all channels?

Bump....

Can't speak of all channels, but now I see that 3.1 was breaking up badly on Anderson on 5/29 at 2200.

What did you have before the Ceton? You're still using it for OTA, right?

[PeteCress]

In case somebody else is having the same problem...

It seems like in my case it was not the Java Heap Size thing.

Instead, it was the blocking on my RecordedTV drives.

My NAS box had been getting a little too full, so I moved RecordedTV to a couple of local drives on the Sage box.

When I did it, I forgot about the admonition to set blocking to 64k and would up with the default 4k blocks.

Re-blocking the drives *seems* to have cured both the stuttering/pausing and some intermittent heavy pixellation that I was trying to ascribe to signal strength.

Not knowing that much about the nuts and bolts, all I can think of is that, as the discs inevitably became heavily-fragmented, the time spent chasing down all those 4k blocks (vs only 1/16th the time for 64k blocks) was causing the problems.