need help getting HD channels

[ElFenix]

my parents just got a panasonic HD tv, with atsc and qam tuners. they also purchased a phillips dtv antenna. i've pointed the antenna roughly southeast, toward the broadcast towers. yet, they cannot get HD signals with the combo. any ideas?

 

[alfa147x]

Here this is the site i used to point mine 😉
http://www.antennaweb.org/aw/welcome.aspx

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: ElFenix
my parents just got a panasonic HD tv, with atsc and qam tuners. they also purchased a phillips dtv antenna. i've pointed the antenna roughly southeast, toward the broadcast towers. yet, they cannot get HD signals with the combo. any ideas?

Make sure you connected to the "air" coax input and have the TV set to "air" and not "cable". That would cause the problem you are seeing.

 

[ElFenix]

i followed that site, all but one of the digital channels in the houston area are yellow, and just about all of them are 130 degrees. or, southeast.

no worky 🙁

Originally posted by: PurdueRy

Originally posted by: ElFenix
my parents just got a panasonic HD tv, with atsc and qam tuners. they also purchased a phillips dtv antenna. i've pointed the antenna roughly southeast, toward the broadcast towers. yet, they cannot get HD signals with the combo. any ideas?

Make sure you connected to the "air" coax input and have the TV set to "air" and not "cable". That would cause the problem you are seeing.

i'll have to make sure my father connected it right, then. he can't really see too well. so if there are multiple places the antenna could plug into, that is a definite possibility.



edit: my parents need to rtfm, need to press an extra button to get the minor channel

 

[spidey07]

Also might be a setting on the tuner to tell it cable or air. This should be in the manual. Then you'll have to actually tune the channels or just have the TV scan all of them.

 

[ElFenix]

figured it out, when the parents autoprogrammed it last, they selected cable as the input type, which made the TV activate the qam tuner rather than the atsc tuner

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: ElFenix
figured it out, when the parents autoprogrammed it last, they selected cable as the input type, which made the TV activate the qam tuner rather than the atsc tuner

Hooray for being right!



Common problem actually. I had a customer back in the days where I worked retail that started complaining up a storm about how a TV was trash because it go no reception. Resulted in a different customer walking out. I talked to the man afterward and asked him if he set it to air....he just kind of paused....and then admitted he did not.

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: PurdueRy

Hooray for being right!



Common problem actually. I had a customer back in the days where I worked retail that started complaining up a storm about how a TV was trash because it go no reception. Resulted in a different customer walking out. I talked to the man afterward and asked him if he set it to air....he just kind of paused....and then admitted he did not.

as far as i can tell the only way you can set the tuner is to autoprogram the TV. kind crappy way to go about it, if you ask me.




thanks for the help, everyone