I have cable, the regular, non-digital kind, through Comcast. And lately the reception's been a little fuzzy, with the fuzziness increasing the higher the channel number it gets. This is a little disconcerting, since Turner Classic is the only channel I regularly watch, and it's channel 52. After coming into the house, the cable only splits once, for the upstairs and the living room, so it's not a case of a weakened signal. I've tried jiggling the cable wires indoors and out, and even bought one of those cable-signal boosters off of ebay--which didn't do anything as far as I can tell. Does anybody have a recommendation besides calling the cable company? And has anyone ever called their cable company for such a problem and had it resolved? Surely I can't be the only one who's had reception issues with their cable!

I have reception problems all the time, and it seems there's nothing left I can try. All the local affiliates look terrible; Fox is consistently fuzzy, and the ABC (formerly NBC) affiliate has a scrolling ghost...thing...going on all the time. I have had three different cable boxes and all the cable and connections have been checked. I wonder whether the problem lies with my local stations. Of course, I should just chuck the cable and get a dish...

Have you guys tried eyeglasses?

You guys just need to get closer to your sets.

Digital isn't necessarily much better. I find I have more reception issues now that Cablevision in NYC has switched over to digital. Frequent minor bursts of pixellization, occasional incidents of the picture freezing momentarily. For quite a while, frequent problems with sound getting slightly but noticeably out of sync on some channels (this was sometimes cleared up simply by switching the channel for a moment or turning the box off and back on), although this hasn't happened in a fairly long time.

Of course, since so many cable companies have local monopolies, there isn't much incentive for them to expend real effort correcting these problems.

And has anyone ever mentioned that they're ridiculously expensive? Let's see... ah, yes, many have.

On the one television that doesn't have digital, the reception is crap, quite frankly. Interference, leading to fuzzy images. I suspect that with the switch to digital, the cable companies are abandoning support for analog stations. The government wants that analog bandwith anyways, so I suppose that's just the way of things.

My big complaint about these digital boxes and recorders that the cable company offers is signal breakup, which happens often, and the fact that the Scientific Atlanta ones that Brighthouse like to reboot if you flip through the channels manually,without using the program guide, too fast. That, and some issues with cutting off a show too early. I missed the last few seconds of SCARED TO DEATH that way, and TCM had a nice print of it, too.

The problem with a dish is bad weather. I missed the last ten minutes of the Eureka season finale because some rain came in and interrupted the signal. So I set my TIVO for the 11 pm showing and SciFi ran some damn 7 minute promo for Battlestar and, you guessed it, the recording stopped 7 minutes before the show did.

I was not pleased.

I had Comcast in Sarasota and it worked great!

I almost shot the TV a la Elvis when this happened to me as well. Now I find myself setting the DVR to record a few minutes over - something I should've been doing already.

When I had analog cable the picture with Comcast was really bad, some channels worse than others, but even the best of them was lacking. Then I switched to RCN analog, and it was miles better. After a few years I wanted to buy HBO, buy this point in time ( 2003 ) RCN had moved HBO off the analog line and you had to upgrade to digital to get HBO. So I relented. Got HBO and the picture with digital was better all around, some channels were markedly better than I had ever seen before.
Then I began to notice the pixelation and the breakup of picture, sometimes a spilt second but sometimes a second or two and there would be an audio drop out. It drove me crazy, but there was nothing RCN could do about it...they just had a crappy difital service. With the advent of On Demand I switched to back to Comcast, becuase Comcast had a zillion more On Demand offerings and also because RCN wanted an extra $ 5 for HBO On Demand. With Comcast you get On Demand for free when you buy HBO. Now with Comcast, at least in my area, all is well nwo and I am very happy with the service, but it was a bitch getting to this point. One complaint is a murky smear that happens in very dark areas of the screen, some kind of low resolution digital artifact. I imagine satilite is better but have not seen it enough to know for sure.
So I think it boils down to analog is dead and they don't care about it, I felt they were making it intentionally worse to force customers to upgrade, although I can't prove this. Digital is better, but service can vary wildly from provider to provider, and even within different areas served by the same provider.
Currently I have an issue with my Howard Stern On Demand which is updated far less frequently than my the service my friend gets a few towns away, also through Comcast.

The breakup occurs because the digital box is unable to keep up with the speed of the signal coming in. They need to offer better hardware.

I've had fuzzy pictures due to two reasons over the years: one was because of a strong local signal was leaking through on the channel; the other was because of the way I had everything hooked up (turns out that an old VCR I had hooked up was messing up the picture due to the connections I was using).

When we first got a dish, we had no problems during the worst of storms. We had to then change to another dish for the area and the "upgrade" has given us problems with every bad storm that rolls through the area. It's still better than the Warner Cable setup in the area - a friend has that and is consistently running into the pixel problem already discussed, as well as the audio jumping ahead.

I have analog cable (as well as broadband internet service) through Time Warner, and have always had a strong, clean signal in my service area. I was considering switching to digital recently, mainly so I could get a DVR from Time Warner for a nominal monthly fee, but right about that time the news came out that Comcast was going to be taking over Time Warner's network in our area early next year. I decided to wait until the dust settles with that transition and see what, if any, end-user hardware changes Comcast implements before making the switch.

Dave

Unfortunately, there's a whole host of things it could be.

How are your 'low channels'? Like 2,3,4 low...

You don't indicate if the splitter used was one from the cable company, or one you added yourself - that could be malfunctioning: you could try temporarily bypassing the splitter and see if the signal improves.

If you've already checked the tightness of your connections, you may want to try and recall if you've hooked up a new electrical device (or moved from one outlet to another) around the same time the problems started. You could have a ground loop going on...

If you've had unseasonably warm weather in your area, it could cause your reception to degrade for awhile; signal strength drops in warmer weather, although this usually is compensated for by the equipment at their end.

I'm just randomly throwing a few things out here... a more complete list would be far, far longer, and still probably not cover half the things it could be, I'm afraid.

Thanks for the suggestions: the one about the splitter was particularly helpful. I ended up unhooking everything and starting from scratch. For a while afterwards it was even worse, until I happened to remove and then reline the cable that comes up through the floor from the garage, and viola! The picture cleared up, and just in time to get OUR MOTHER'S HOUSE off TCM. (Now of course I'm walking around on tiptoe like a silent movie comedian, trying not to jolt it out of place. :lol: ) I suspect that old cables are the real culprit here, since many of them are 15-20 years old. Even at its best, the analogue signal was never crystal clear--channel 2 (CBS) has always been weak, and having grown up in the area I can instantly identify which broadcast channel (ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, PBS) I'm watching from the "look" of the signal--but it's also clearly degraded a bit over time. However for the moment TCM looks fine; good enough at least for DR. CYCLOPS tonight at 8.

This thread's put my mind at ease on a couple points--I missed the end too and all this time I assumed I'd set my DVD recorder wrong!

I used to have that with analog too, but forgot. The cable line worked like an antenna and I would whip the extra length around and let it fall and the picture would improve or get worse depending on where it lay. It ended up that different positions worked for certain channels, and others required a repositoning. It never made any sense why it worked but it did.

The 11pm episode of EUREKA follows wrestling which always runs over by several minutes. I discovered this when I started recording the 11pm show. Thankfully, I discovered it before the recording ended so I was able to adjust by adding 5 minutes.

A lot of network programming messes up the start and end times. My DVR keeps cutting off the final bit of MY NAME IS EARL. It's very freaking annoying.

I have or had Adelphia. It frankly sucked regarding transmission and programming too when I came on board (I've experienced all the problems testified to, and am familiar with satellite's shortcomings as well, but that's another provider, elsewhere) -- customers complained en masse and threatened to go Satellite or drop off the grid altogether, the company more or less got its act together, a liveable blend of programs with decent public access outlets followed, halfhearted hurray...and, as soon as that happened, Time Warner took over!

They've been promising-threatening systemic changes for a month or two, but haven't quite rolled out their new program on time. A week overdue...I'm dreading going back to square one...whereas the better future really ought to be starting about now with alla carte menus of thousands of channels of whatever you choose the world over to watch however often you choose to watch with enough free preview time allowed you to decide your personal program...and viewable via broadband Internet rather than TV if that's your personal choice.

I know transmission specifically is what was queried about, but I would like to add into the discussion the long term quandary of going truly digital. Sooner or later cable providers who also provide broadband and/or phone will have to contend with a one box fits all model (as demonstrated in part already by I-Tunes, a good example of pay as you go without an additional connection necessary to make it work; don't own one but I believe an I-Pod is something paid for once or as many times as you choose to replace it), namely computer with monitor, and stop trying to sell us a couple or several sorts of connections with hardware attached to bill separately. I believe monitor/hardware makers can deal with this already: a household will have home computer ones and entertainment system others and nice cell phones for those calls you can't make from your home computer, but service providers as currently prevailing have got to be addicted to the distinct revenue streams tapping into as many separately chargeable boxes and lines as possible, some of which are ridiculously obsolescent (like my land line phone and its hook-up, extremely rarely used these days (two or three calls apart from incoming phone spam), but regularly paid for and costing as much as my water bill.)

Any thoughts on this?

I'd try a high end cable and a db attenuator to help the signal strength.

You can use iTunes without the iPod. For music, you can burn stuff to CD to play on any CD player. I think current copy protection allows seven burns to CD [other online music sources don't have copy protection]. For video, you can watch it on your PC, which is probably generally preferable to watching on the tiny iPod screen anyway, unless you spend a lot of time watching tv during your commute or whatever.

By the way, a number of network shows are now available online for free. ABC has streaming episodes of GREY'S ANATOMY, DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES, LOST, UGLY BETTY, SIX DEGREES and THE NINE. I haven't checked other network offerings.

http://dynamic.abc.go.com/streaming/landing