Sometimes, too much Digital TV signal can be the problem

In some recent back and forth email conversations I had with Suzanne Goucher of the Maine Association of Broadcasters, she provided me with some further insight about digital TV signals which is pretty important.

First, one new piece of the puzzle, at least it was new to me, is that if you have very strong digital TV signals it could actually cause a degradation of the signal. It's like the old adage "Too much of a good thing". Ms Goucher, like me, admitted to not being a technical expert on this stuff but provided an analogy that seemed to make sense: "if you think about throwing a rock into the water, you get strong ripples at the center and weaker ripples further out. Now, add in sticks and rocks and boats and other obstacles, and the ripples start bouncing back and forth and overlapping one another or smacking up against the rocks, and it becomes much less of a "straight line" proposition"

She also used WGME as an example and provide me with an FCC Analog map and an FCC Digital map of the digital signal area from the WGME Tower. Note that the two maps are almost identical: (click image to enlarge)

Analog:

Digital:

The last important piece of information that Ms. Goucher shared with me was an article written about 10 years ago regarding digital reception problems. If I didn't know it, I would have thought it was written just yesterday.

Here's the link: http://www.current.org/dtv/dtv815reception.shtml

So there's some good information here. Some of it may help those of you struggling with Digital TV reception and some of it may at least explain why you are having reception issues to begin with.

I'd like to personally thank Suzanne Goucher from the Maine Association of Broadcasters for her commitment to providing information to Maine's population about digital television.