Poor Quality of Dish Locals

[tvdxer]

Has anybody noticed the poor video quality of the DISH locals?

I receive the Duluth locals (KDLH, KBJR, WDSE, WDIO, KQDS, and KRII, which is virtually the same as KBJR) by both air and dish. The digital DISH signal appears to be terribly over-compressed, while the off-air analog signal, when the antenna is pointed correctly (to avoid ghosting, etc.) received at about an 8-mi distance is of a much higher quality.

[MarkA]

Yup, LIL does that. If you're competant enough to setup a good terrestrial antenna, and are like the (I'd imagine) 90+ % of Americans who can a good clean signal with the correct aerial and installation, then by all means do so. LIL is meant to provide locals to the technically incompetant and those whose signal is blocked or suffers severe (beyond what a directional antenna can help) multipath; and has also been liked by some other groups because you get onscreen guide listings for LIL channels and you can DVR them. It's not meant to provide a high quality local feed however.

[Bill R]

You should send your complaints to DishQuality@Echostar.com and they will forward the complaint to whoever (usually Sprint) that maintains your local POP (point of presence, where they pick up and digitize the signal). It sometimes takes several tries (over a period of a couple of weeks) but if you keep complaining they will do something about the picture.

[TonyM]

Bill
That ain't gonna work. I have Duluth locals too and they ain't bad (compared to my OTA signal...which is crap)

The problem is Duluth is split amongst 3 TP's, maxing out the 3 spotbeams

WDIO & KDLH are on TP 2
KBJR WDSE & KQDS are on Tp 8
KRII is on TP10

use to have Mpls locals (which are on TP8) and when I got the Duluth ones, the Mpls ones did go down in quality.

When you cram 12 channels on a TP, this happens

[TonyM]

Originally Posted by tvdxer

Has anybody noticed the poor video quality of the DISH locals?

I receive the Duluth locals (KDLH, KBJR, WDSE, WDIO, KQDS, and KRII, which is virtually the same as KBJR) by both air and dish.

The only thing different between KBJR & KRII are some commericals and about 10 minutes of the news.

They both are there because partly of two reasons
-Direct is carrying both
-They both qualify for Must Carry (since KBJR is licensed to Superior)

[garypen]

Originally Posted by Bill R

You should send your complaints to DishQuality@Echostar.com and they will forward the complaint to whoever (usually Sprint) that maintains your local POP (point of presence, where they pick up and digitize the signal). It sometimes takes several tries (over a period of a couple of weeks) but if you keep complaining they will do something about the picture.

The problem is usually over-compression in the Dish signal itself. It rarely has anything to do with the source. You can write. But, you probably won't see any improvement. Like the old expression goes, "you can't polish a turd".

OTOH, if the problem is something like one channel of audio is out, or the image is B&W, writing to "dishquality" may help. It won't help the fuzzy, grainy, "smudgy" image it seems the original poster is referring to.

[Jason Nipp]

Originally Posted by garypen

Like the old expression goes, "you can't polish a turd".

No but you can lacquer it with lots of polyurethane to make it shiny...This also camouflages the odor….LOL...Don't ask!

[ypsiguy]

A lot of it has to do with the quality/bitrate of video sent to Dish by the local station. In Detroit, our PBS affiliate's DTV SD signal and their signal sent to Dish are almost identical in quality. However, I will agree that Dish's overcompression does not help either.

[garypen]

To truly see how Dish farks up the image, it helps to have an 811 with digital OTA reception. You simply compare the xx-1 and xx-0 channels.

Even comparing Dish locals directly to the analog tuner in your TV, as long as you get good analog reception, will also do a pretty good job of demonstarting what Dish compression does to PQ.

[ibglowin]

It seems to vary depending on your location. My Inlaws in Missouri have absolute terrible PQ. My dad in San Antonio has good PQ. Here in NM, our locals are excellent.

All are E*.

[homeskillet]

I notice that my locals that are on the SuperDISH 105 are 10 times better than the Kansas City locals I get on 119. KC is overcompressed and I used to watch football on Denver because it had better quality and for last weeks MNF game it was horrible. I switched back to the SuperDISH local and it was great.