Re: HDTV Wonder Discussion
Yes, but for folks who live in an area where the signals originate from substantially different directions, they will need a rotator.
Obviously, Forest Grove enjoys what amounts to a pretty unanimous line of sight to the stations broadcasting from the Portland West Hills where all the local HDTV signals originate. You're lucky.
This is just not the case in places like Dallas, Los Angeles or the surrounding areas, and numerous other large metro areas, or even Manhattan(where multipath reflections are horrid and will only get worse when transmission power is ramped up to coincide with the reduction in Analog broadcast)
Right now, most HDTV signals are not broadcast at the full FCC Authorized signal strength. Even countering for vastly different maximum signal strengths between any number of unique stations as well as the independent levels for any particular station causes enough of a problem as we see from much of the pioneering work done with several cards over at
www.avsforum.com.
And again, while the chipsets are good in these PC Tuners, the rest of the circuitry is not nearly as robust as that in HDTV Television Receivers for multipath rejection, mostly due to power availability and circuit board real-estate.
Surely, it will get better as HDTV matures in common use, but for now, good antennas and the ability to aim them is very important for the majority of HDTV viewers who want HDTV reception as stable and predictable as they are used to with Analog. (Those that remember OTA NTSC anyway, so few not equipped with CATV or Satellite these days)
As usual, I will likely be one of the "early adopters" of PC HDTV (not as early as many, of course), but I sure look forward to the time when PC HDTV is as easy, robust and reliable as Digital Cable Ready / CableCARD Television seems to be from Cable Labs certification testing results.