Digital TV Stations

Stations in Augusta GA don't come in often enough to be useful. This may change in February 2009 when WRDW moves its digital signal to channel 12 (VHF), and WJBF and WAGT are no longer subject to co-channel interference from analog signals from Charlotte.

Finally, on rare occasions I can briefly receive stations up to about 260 miles away (so far), via tropospheric ducting during certain weather conditions.

In the tables below, the rows are color-coded according to their general level of reception quality. The key is at the bottom. Generally speaking, green and yellow are reliable in the evening and at night, and orange is also common at night.

Virtual channel numbers are the ones that normally appear in a digital TV's channel list or program guide. They correspond to a station's traditional analog channel number. Physical channel numbers are the ones that digital signals are actually broadcast on, and are normally hidden from the viewer. When the analog channels shut down in February 2009, some stations will move their digital signals to different channels (usually the former analog channels), but their virtual channel numbers will remain the same.

Links

The callsigns are linked to the stations' Web sites. The virtual channel numbers and descriptions are linked to screenshots of the channels.

Unfortunately, most of these do not show the actual picture quality of the channels, because I did not capture them directly from the broadcast digital data (e.g. with a USB tuner or tuner card on my computer). I dubbed samples from a HD DVR to a DVD recorder (which reduces picture quality both via the S-video connection and the MPEG-2 compression of the DVD format), then extracted frames from the DVD on my computer (which introduces de-interlacing artifacts), and finally saved them in JPEG format (which reduces the picture quality further).

Update: I've now started to replace the screenshots with high-resolution ones extracted from MPEG-2 streams recorded by an EyeTV Hybrid USB tuner. They're marked with a * in the description. These are JPEG images, so their quality is still slightly less than the original video. I've downscaled 1080i images from 1920x1080 pixels to 1280x720, to match the 720p images.