GrepACE
join:2004-11-10
Champaign, IL
1 edit |  Champaign and terrible reception
I live in north west Champaign and have been plagued with pretty bad television reception for quite a while. My upper channels are really grainy and the local channels look absolutely terrible (especially WAND).
I recently went digital and got a DVR box (which is pretty darn cool by the way). The installer instantly noticed that the picture quality on the analog channels looked pretty bad. He checked the signal at the tap and it was reading something like -5db and at the house it was reading -18db! He could not believe that my broadband service was even working at all. My broadband connection and download speeds have been just fine though.
Insight sent out a service tech and they supposedly got the signal boosted at the tap to an acceptable level. However, the picture quality was still pretty much the same on the analog channels. After experiencing the decent quality of the digital channels and now having to pay a much larger bill, I decided to complain. I was promised that a new line from the tap to my house would be ran and an amplifier would be installed. I took off work on Monday afternoon and camped out at the house on the 1PM-5PM wait. No one showed. I complained again, then on Tuesday, they finally ran a new line. The first thing I noticed was that the installer did not clean up his/her mess (there was cut cable laying in the yard). I checked the reception and it looked worse in my opinion. I popped open the box on the side of the house and noticed that there was no amplifier even installed. It was just a new line plugged into the same old 4-way splitter.
I am at my wits end here. I wish they would give me the equipment and I would do the job myself (and do it right). Has anyone else experienced such bad service from Insight? More importantly, how is your television reception?
Thanks for reading through this, it helps to vent.  | |
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KevlarGibs
@insightBB.com
| Re: Champaign and terrible reception The analog signals in Bloomington are bad, mostly at the very low channels, like 15 or below. I'm also quite dissapointed with the signal quality of the digital channels too... for an easy example, watch G4 when they are showing clips of a fighting game, like soul calibur 2... the whole screen turns to encoding artifacts. | |
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rich_joy
Premium
join:2004-10-17
Rockford, IL
| If your Digital/DVR box is the same one I use, Motorola 1620 (also HD), the unit has a know problem with the lower channels. The quality on the lower channel sucks. Insight recognizes this but seems to awful slow in introducing the new cable boxes which will fix this. | |
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IGGY
No Guru Just Here To Help
Premium,MVM
join:2001-03-30
Chatham, IL
| Re: Champaign and terrible reception "Insight recognizes this but seems to awful slow in introducing the new cable boxes which will fix this."
This thread gives a bit more detail on all of that.
»Re: Anyone got a Dual Tuner HD DVR box yet?
I'm not 100% sure how much of this can be blamed on Insight. I think the box manufacturer Motorola has some responsibility in this. I'm not a 100% sure. But I think many Comcast users with this box have offered similar complaints. So I think it might be a cable box issue more than the system it's being used on.
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rudnicke
Premium
join:2004-10-23
Rantoul, IL | I had the same issue with bad lower channels. I just purchased a 4pt Electroline amp from ebay and put it inline. No problems now. | |
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