Getting HD on my TV

[Pandamonium]

So a couple of black fridays ago, I snagged an Element FLX-3202 HDTV. It has built-in ATSC and NTSC tuners. My understanding is that NTSC is over the air analog television, and ATSC is over the air digital television, which for the major networks, also happens to be HD.

So on the rear of the set, I have a two coax inputs, one labeled cable and the other HDTV. I am pretty sure that this set doesn't support QAM, so I shouldn't be able to get HD over basic cable/unencrypted coax. So I suspect that I have to get an indoor antenna, which would have a coax connector that I can plug into my coax HDTV-in. Am I correct or way off base here?

 

[Shawn]

You are correct. You can plug in to cable and get all the SD channels too. That's why your set has 2 coax inputs.

 

[Pandamonium]

So to clarify, you mean I can buy an antenna and plug its coax into my TV's coax-in labeled "cable" and get analog reception? And, provided the antenna also works for digital signals, connect it to the coax-in labeled "HDTV" and get digital reception?

This might be a stupid followup, but why would my TV not allow me to plug cable from my wall into the HDTV coax-in and tune regular cable through that tuner? I tried this initially to see if the set had QAM (I didn't feel like looking up the specs), and the fact that it failed to tune anything at all baffled me.

 

[Shadowknight]

Just plug an antenna into the antenna jack and the cable into the cable jack. Since you didn't sound sure about the antenna, ALL antenna's are "hd", so a pair of rabbit ears will get you digital channels (if available in your area).

 

[sdifox]

head over to antennaweb to get the recommendation on which antenna you should get based on your location

http://www.antennaweb.org/

 

[zzuupp]

Originally posted by: Pandamonium
So to clarify, you mean I can buy an antenna and plug its coax into my TV's coax-in labeled "cable" and get analog reception? And, provided the antenna also works for digital signals, connect it to the coax-in labeled "HDTV" and get digital reception?

This might be a stupid followup, but why would my TV not allow me to plug cable from my wall into the HDTV coax-in and tune regular cable through that tuner? I tried this initially to see if the set had QAM (I didn't feel like looking up the specs), and the fact that it failed to tune anything at all baffled me.

Each tuner has its own input, so your TV has two coax plugs.
Analog cable & analog over the air TV have slightly different bandplans, but the same modulation scheme (NTSC). Your TV's analog input can do either.

As you noted, digital cable is QAM, but digital over the air is the ATSC modulation scheme.
Your TV can only decode the latter.

The cool thing is with two discrete inputs you can do PiP, and you don't need an external switch to change sources.