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* OVER THE PAST COUPLE OF YEARS, I HAVE RUN numerous tests of indoor and outdoor DTV recep- tion. Those tests have taken place in apartments, basements, attics, on roofs, on a nearby hilltop and even on the rear deck of my house.
I've used numerous first-generation and second-generation 8VSB tuners, preamps and all kinds of test equipment to see just how difficult over-the-air reception really is.
Regular readers will recall that I had success in a surprising number of locations, particularly with newer tuners such as Samsung's SIR-T150 and even with PC card tuners made by accessDTV and Hauppauge Electronics. My explorations yielded a stack of gain tables and hundreds of spectrum ana- lyzer plots that occupy several CD-ROMs.
Until recently, I had never done a simultaneous side-byside test of all the antennas I had in my stockpile. The task seemed too daunting, but repeated requests for an allinclusive table of antenna performance from readers and from members of various online forums finally did it. Over a period of two days, I dragged every antenna I could find out of my attic, basement, office and studio, set them up on my backyard test range and ran comparative gain tests for each and every one.
On the third day, I dragged a bunch of antennas into my studio and ran indoor VHF/UHF performance tests, including reception of the seven available DTV signals in the area. Although not as complex as the outdoor tests, they were nearly as time-consuming-but the tests yielded reams of data.
This month's column will go into the outdoor performance tests, and I'll discuss the indoor antennas in the July 2002 issue.
OUTDOOR TESTING
TUNER PERFORMANCE has improved geometrically. Samsung, Zenith and Sony are all coming out with new third-generation set-top receivers this summer and fall. Samsung is bringing three new models to market: the SIR-T151, an economy OTA-- only tuner; the SIR-T160 combo OTA/DirecTV box (enabled
with HDCP-DVI); and the SIR-T165, another OTA-only design with IEEE-1394 output for interfacing with JVC's HMDH3000OU D-VHS recorder/player.
Meanwhile, Linx Electronics, a company consisting of ex-- Zenith employees, has developed an even better 8VSB receiver system that practically eliminates multipath problems. Dubbed "Casper" (because it makes ghosts friendly), this receiver was...