This probably will merit the dumb question of the month but what happens when you try tuning a ATSC channel on a NTSC tuner ? I know you obviously can't enter 5.1 but you could enter 5. I would think if you scrolled thru all the frequencies available on UHF and VHF with a analog NTSC tuner you would at least see a totally scrambled signal of sorts.

Hey I would try it if I was at ho9me but I thought of it on the way to work this morning.

-Don B

You can't even see it. Digital vs analog RF signal, different technology that the NTSC tuner just doesn't see. Maybe the snow would look slightly different, I don't know. Same on my D* boxes. Channel 86 is something in HD, but it just doesn't exist through an SD box, claims No channel or whatever it does for other non-existant channels.

Wow, I never realised how well you could mask a signal if you wanted to or even didn't want to.

Don B

It's not 'masked', your NTSC tuner designed 60 years ago has no way of demodulating an ATSC signal.
Try tuning it in on a radio...see how that 'looks'.

automan1,

My AM/FM radio does not receive the same frequency range as VHF - UHF TV. Or were you just trying to be funny.

-Don B

An NTSC tuner is designed to look for the frequency of the channel and then decode or interpret the analog signal being carried by that frequency. An ATSC tuner is designed to look for the frequency of the channel and then decode or interpret the digital signal being carried by that frequency. An NTSC tuner will not know what the hech the digital information on the frequncy is, thusly, no picture. The reason they can both be carried on the same frequency is because they are two different forms of information.

Automan was correct in that it wasn't masked. It is just a completely different form of information than what an NTSC tuner was meant to decode.

Gosh … this is strange I only see PAL through my am-fm tuner, but I also have 8-bay directional antenna pointed straight up and I only listen to” THEM” (the gray’s)
heh hee ....sorry

Damnit, I have to agree with automan again. That's exactly the point. Can you see your TV signal on your 2.4GHz cordless phone? Different signal, doesn't see it.

I have a true "legacy" device, a Leader antenna signal meter from the mid eighties. It has dial tuning, so you can carefully tune around all of VHF and UHF. It has an AM detector so you can zero in on analog video for signal strength.

I finally have realized that when I tune across a digital channel, I get a hiss from the speaker, and this can be peaked (tuned in). So, an FM detector will only get hiss. This sort of reduces the question to asking why you only get loud hiss when you play a dts disc in a CD player. It's because the signal is not interpretable by the device.

There is ONE way to see if you have a digital station on an analog channel -- try to put a modulator on that channel and mix with the antenna signal. If the modulated signal is all screwed up, then you are looking at an analog signal mixed with a digital signal, and the TV just can't clearly show the analog signal.