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I`m looking for a radio that picks up audio T V signals. Where can I find one? Thanks for any info...Herb

Reply to
herbwhite59
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4 times. You're starting to get annoying.

But I'd like one too and I checked and surprisingly there are several for sale. One that google finds on Best Buy doesn't mention Tv. Another has been sold since 2002, before TV was digital iirc. Another looks just like the AM-FM-TV radio I have and used to like but which doesn't know about digital. One says TV in the heading but no mention in the specs.

These are all on Best Buy or Amazon. Maybe they should stop things that don't have TV from saying TV!

Reply to
micky

Digital made that a lot more complicated. NTSC audio was just broadcast in the clear on the FM band so it was trivial to put a TV band tuner in an FM radio. Now you would need a digital tuner to get the whole stream, this strip out the audio. You would also find out pretty fast that the little whip antenna that worked great on analog is not up to the digital world. As you know if you use an antenna, as soon as that picture starts pixilating the audio drops out. It is all part of the same stream.

Reply to
gfretwell

The antenna isn't a problem - as long as the OP didn't want easy portability. <?> I used one of these fractal units for an elderly friend, in the nursing home - to save him paying for cable TV - when he only needed a few local stations anyway. It worked just fine perched inside on his window sill. Minor position adjustments were required to fine tune the TV signal.

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Finding a "radio" is another matter - I'd be tempted to get a used cast-off 19 inch LED TV and use it . . John T.

Reply to
hubops

For the computer there are USB dongles that plug in.

You do have to be careful and make sure you get one for the US if thatis where you live. There are many for the European stations for about 10 to 20 dollars. Most of the ones for the US seem to run slightly higher.

As mentioned, the antenna will be the thing. The whole signal is digital unlike the older analog TV signal where there the audio was transmitted at a slightly different frequency from the video and it did not take all that much signal just for the audio.

Reply to
Ralph Mowery

Fractal antrenna - build your own.

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John T.

Reply to
hubops

You are correct that NTSC audio was a frequency modulated signal.

You are incorrect (with one minor caveat) that it was trival to put a TV band tuner in an FM radio. The caveat being the frequency allocation for channel 6 was just below the FM band, analog FM tuners could tune low enough to pick up the audio for channel six.

The audio carriers for the remaining VHF channels were outside the broadcast FM radio band and the UHF (14+) were way outside the broadcast FM radio band. Adding circuitry to handle the wide VHF range required along with the UHF to a standard Broadcast FM Radio-band receiver in order to recieve audio from the NTSC channels other than six would have to be recouped via higher cost to the buyer of the set.

Reply to
Scott Lurndal

I suppose that depends on how far you are from the tower. I am using a "75 mile deep fringe" Yagi antenna and it is barely enough to get towers 30 miles away. Those little flat panels they sell on TV are useless.

Reply to
gfretwell

That is why I said TV Tuner. The rest of the radio was pretty much the same, you just needed a tuner section with a wider mouth. I had one of those little "TV Radios" for years. They were pretty cheap and battery operated so if you were interested in a show where the script was more interesting than the video it was OK.

Reply to
gfretwell

Since the FCC auctioned off the VHF high band, we now have a VHF low band TV station around 60 mHz. A 5 foot rabbit ear is minimum requirement, and that channel has at least 4 sub channels. People with little UHF antennas are lost in the shuffle.

Greg

Reply to
gregz

The home-made fractal antenna, linked above, picked up 3 - 4 TV stations. Location Brantford Ontario. John T.

Reply to
hubops

I never listened to more than a couple minutes, and it wasn't designed for radio, but I think Law & Order would be a good show to listen to.

Reply to
micky

I fooled around with it a bit too. I'm about the same distance, 35 miles, flat terrain. I borrowed one of those panel antennas. I didn't expect it would receive anything. But it did pick up NBC and CBS plus a few of the lesser channels sometime. At good times, it was rock steady. At bad times one or the other or both would be either not there at all or breaking up so bad it was unwatchable. I figured if that worked at ground level, if I put a real antenna in the attic, it would probably work much better. Which proved true, to some extent. Since I wasn't committed to really using it, I opted for a cheap $15 Chinese, Yagi style one from Ebay. It was supposed to be outdoors, included a rotor and amplifier for $15. ROFL. I knew it was going to be flimsy, but then an antenna is just some pieces of metal and I was going to try it in the attic. So, it worked much better, but still not so great. ABC was still mostly not there, even CBS and NBC while better, were not improved as much as you'd think you'd get by raising it 15 ft higher and having that better antenna. (It was about 3ft long, 2 ft wide) It did pick up a lot more of the other channels, with some stuff of interest. But even with NBC and CBS there were great periods and crap periods. And the weird thing that I haven't seen anyone explain is how it goes from one to the other, within minutes.

I can understand if it's raining or windy that it would decline. But it also went from great to really bad or gone with no change in the weather, at least not that I could tell. And it wasn't like it was a passing cloud or something either. It could be a calm evening, suddenly it starts going from great to problems and within 15 mins it was either unwatchable or gone altogether. And then it would be kaput for a a long time, like the rest of the night. I have no clue what causes this, I've seen lots of people experiencing the same thing, no one has any credible explanation. One guy thought it was related to humidity, that might be a partial factor, but the humidity doesn't change drastically in 15 mins and from my limited experience, there was no correlation with anything. Sometimes it could be raining heavily and it was working fine.

The next step would have been to spend $75 for real antenna but I concluded that since I had cable, there wasn't enough other stuff there to make it worthwhile. And I'm not sure if that would work really well either. With NTSC and a decent outdoor antenna it was easy to get reliable reception here.

That Ebay antenna was really something. It was for outdoors, but it wouldn't last a month here. Very flimsy, a bird could bust it. It had an amplifier on the antenna, not potted, just a circuit board with a plastic cover over it. Cheap little motor. No indication on the inside unit as to which way it's pointed. Wire from the amp to antenna was broken off, had to solder that back on.

Then there are the TV ad guys selling antennas that are not even the panel that goes in the window, just a little one that screws on the coax jack and has two little 6" extendible ears. The guy hawking it is down there by you, he shows it working on a boat a mile offshore. It even works here, offshore. BFD. They probably picked a spot

5 miles from the transmitter and it's over water, completely unobstructed. I'm still left wondering how well a large antenna would work here. I don't know anyone that has one, IDK anyone here that is doing OTA at all. Maybe ATSC was the best thing that ever happened to the cable companies.
Reply to
trader_4

I listen to TV a lot. If a shows writing is so bad that it is dependent on sight gags I don't want to watch it anyway. I outgrew the

3 stooges when I was about 6. I have an RF headset and I walk around doing things more productive when the TV is on. I am finding just turning the damned thing off is better most of the time. I will crank up my tunes if I need something to listen to.
Reply to
gfretwell
[snip]

I have known people who listened to channel 6 on their FM radios (in 1978).

BTW, cable channel 22 is located just below channel 7, and you could get

22 on an old (non cable-ready) TV by adjusting the fine tuning. [snip]
Reply to
Mark Lloyd
[snip]

A friend used to have one of those TV-band radios. It had 2 additional bands, one for TV-Lo (2-6) and the other for TV-Hi (7-13). No UHF, maybe it was too expensive to add circuitry for such hig frequencies.

Reply to
Mark Lloyd
[snip]

I have an antenna like that. Although it claims to work on VHF-Hi, it won't get channel 7 from a city 30 miles away (it does really use channel 7).

Reply to
Mark Lloyd
[snip]

Did they? I always thought it was UHF channels 38-51 that are no longer used for TV.

IIRC, that would be channel 3.

One of the channels here is on VHF-Hi (7). The others are UHF. Note that two of those recently changed frequencies.

Reply to
Mark Lloyd

I live about 40 miles from two major transmitting areas. One is just about opposit of the other. Hooked to my ham antenna that is tuned for about 445 HHz and is up about 70 feet on a tower I get around 43 chanels. I know some of them are really 3 or so from the same transmitter. They have lots of stuff that is not on my Direct tV or could even be had on DTV if I had their largest package. They have lots of old shows and movies on them.

Reply to
Ralph Mowery

And the weird thing that I haven't seen anyone explain is

The weakness of the ATSC digital TV system used in the US is multipath.

Multipath simply causes ghosts on analog TV.

But digital TV will crash from too much multipath.

You can have a strong signal strength, but if there is too much multipath it still won't work. Unfortunately, it is hard to diagnose because you cannot see the problem on a TV.

You CAN (sometimes) see the problem on an RF Spectrum analyzer. If are are really into it, you can by a low cost USB dongle RF spectrum analyzer and look at the digital TV signal. You can then see SOME, but not all multipath.

Google key words for the gory details would be "ATSC, Adaptive Equalizer" , multipath, 8VSB vs OFDM, .

M
Reply to
makolber

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