Hooked up my digital converter and the picture looks like crap!

[bif]

I have a directional antenna on top of the house. When the converter is off, the picture is perfect. When it's on, the picture looks lousy and the sound is crappy too. What the heck am I doing wrong?

[guitar man]

1. is your tv on channel 3?

You hook it up and run it like a VCR, either on channel 3 through the composite (cable/antenna) input or through auxilliary AV in jacks if you've got them. be sure to check and see if there is a channel 3/4 switch on the converter box too and that it is set for the channel you want to use. Some AV equipment offers this option so you can use channel 4 as an input if you're picking up intereference on 3.

good luck and please feel free to ask me anything, I work in television :hi:

[bif]

2. Fixed it

I was using the coaxial line and it looked like crap. So I switched to RCA jacks and put the tv on Aux1 and now it looks great. I thought the coaxial connection wa supposed to be pretty good.

[guitar man]

3. it depends

If you have a channel 2,3 or 4 in the area that is still operating an analog transmitter, you may be catching some interference. Everything is going to change after June 12 when the last of the analog transmitters shut down. It cannot get here soon enough for me :(

[bif]

4. We have a channel 2 & 4!

[guitar man]

5. that's probably it

After june 12 you might not have any more problems if you want to run the coax input.

[bif]

6. Th coaxial cable was bad, too

Which explains why I couldn't hook up my DVD player to my TV

[insanity]

7. Coaxial cable is my enemy

[Oeditpus Rex]

8. Also note that there are different grades of TV coax

I knew RG-6 was preferable to RG-59 because it has better shielding and a larger core, but I didn't know about this:


RG6 Dual or Quad Shield shouldn't be utilized for base band applications, such as video projectors, component video, plasma TV’s, etc. It may sound like a great solution because of all the layers of shielding, but RG6 Dual and Quad Shield don't have the proper type of shielding for the above described applications. It is manufactured using foil shields and braided aluminum shields. The makeup of the shields differs between models. The effective range of operation for foil shields is above 50MHz, which makes them perfect for rejection of radio frequency interference, or RFI, that may have an effect on satellite or cable installations. At frequencies below 50 MHz, however, foil shields are not effective. The braiding on the RG6 Dual shield and the RG6 Quad shield doesn't have enough coverage to work effectively with baseband applications.

The frequencies that are used in High Definition are usually around 37 MHz. For those lower frequencies, an RG59 with an 95% copper all-copper shield is designed to block RFI inclusion at base band frequencies. RG59’s “big brother” is an RG6 Single Shield , which consists of the same makeup as RG59 but has a thicker center conductor, for less signal loss, and longer runs. Because RG59 does not have a foil shield, it shouldn't be utilized for satellite feeds or cable feeds.


http://www.abccables.com/info-rg59-vs-rg6.html