A Grievance over Spectrum Reallocation

I probably complain a lot in this and even over blogs. (If you don’t like my complaining here, then be glad that you haven’t read my Madam Secretary blog back when that show was still on.) If you want to skip this post as a result, go ahead. There’s no shame in it. I’m going to have to explain some of what this post is about as you may not have heard of spectrum reallocation and probably don’t care.

Indeed, many people probably weren’t affected by spectrum reallocation because they have satellite or cable TV. I’m one of those weirdoes who doesn’t have either, but still watches a shit ton of TV still. But there was an unprecedented problem for me once this happened.

I use a device called a TV tuner to record TV on my laptop and then watch it later. It was doing well, but has occasional glitches over time due to its age and other issues. As advanced as it seems, it was actually outdated technology by the time I had it and started using it. Indeed, the problems that I have now with TV shows over spectrum reallocation were largely due to the TV tuner and high definition TV.

Now I’ve done three paragraphs thus far without explaining what spectrum reallocation is. Basically, the FCC wanted certain frequencies cleared up for future use that TV networks were already using. They were then forced to change this over time and forced those with DTV to rescan channels in order to keep watching what they already got. The old channel would be gone forever, never to come in again while the new channel that has the same content would be somewhere else on a different frequency. You’d think that this wouldn’t be that annoying, but it was.

This whole process was a ten part one and actually ends tomorrow with the last possible rescan going on when it is July 3^rd 2020. No more rescans will ever happen again or be needed. Well, that’s what they are saying now and we can only hope that the FCC doesn’t change things and make things annoying like this in the future by causing troubles in other ways. I also don’t know how much of this was the fault of US Congress for passing the law that lead to this happening.

Still, it is hard not to get annoyed at the FCC for this since the TV tuner problems I’m having because of this rescan obviously wouldn’t have happened without the rescan. It also might not have affected me as much if it just didn’t happen to affect any of my local affiliates. But it did.

I forget when it was last year that I learned that my FOX affiliate was affected by this. I didn’t know what it was called at the time and only found out more about it by using Wikipedia. At first, I wasn’t sure that it even was affecting it, but then found out that it did. I rescanned the two standard definitions TV of mine without a problem as I was able to use the update instead of having to rescan and potentially lose any affiliates that I already have.

This affected the high definition TV more as rescanning channels was the only option and I lost other networks for a moment after it was over, but was able to get some of them back. Then, I learned that the rescan would happen again and I’d lose my main CW and one of my CBS affiliates. Thus, when I had to rescan channels again, I lost the ABC one on the high definition TV, but will hopefully get that back in the future when I try rescanning again. I’ve lost it before for other, dumb reasons, and hope to get it back again like I did then. I just have to wait until all I want to see is coming in normally.

What made it worse for me was how the TV tuner didn’t seem to work getting in the new FOX. I had done this rescan twice and was in danger of losing nearly everything, which thankfully didn’t happen in the end. The main issue going forward would be that there would be no way of putting FOX shows on my TV tuner possibly ever again if I didn’t keep trying to get it back. I wasn’t taking the risk yet since staying with everything but FOX wouldn’t be that big of an issue. As long as the other affiliates would work, I’d be able to manage with FOX not ever being on the TV tuner again.

Now since I know that there is an end time to this and I would need to get CW back on it now in addition to FOX, I will have to try again and hope that I can get all five of the major networks on my TV tuner again and not have to go without some shows at times like I have before. (I know that there are only four major networks as the poor CW doesn’t get the respect the rest of network TV does, so I put it with the other four and call it the fifth network that it deserves to be.) I can only hope that if I get just four of the five networks, things will be okay in the end. I want to keep watching what I want to, even though this shouldn’t really matter and affect me too much.

Ultimately, this is what the issue is and I wouldn’t be having issues at all were it not for the fact that the FCC forced this on people and my TV tuner couldn’t get the new affiliates that would actually air the new content now instead of a black screen. I wish that there would be more that I could do to fix this and am left to the limits of technology forced upon me by the FCC. I don’t know why this had to be done and wish that there was some other way to do this. I doubt that I’m the only one who is annoyed or affected by this. I don’t even know what affiliates I might have lost already that don’t come in that much anyways and thus never aired any warnings. FOX has now starting having reception problems for me that it never had before and I just don’t get why this was forced upon people.