Free HDTV in Ottawa not without complications

Ryan O’Connor is a nerd. He loves gadgets, raves about having the smallest smartphone of any of his friends, and gets excited about things like over-the-air HDTV. To gear up for the Stanley Cup Playoffs, he bought an HDTV and indoor/outdoor HD antenna with dreams of watching CBC’s free high-definition feed.

O’Connor lives in Sandy Hill, or below Sandy Hill. His apartment is in the TV dead zone, or so he was told when he called The Source to ask about the reception he was—or, more accurately, wasn’t—getting.

“When I told them my address,” laughs O’Connor, “they made that kind of, ‘Uhhhh…’ sound and told me Sandy Hill is a dead zone for TV signals.”

Over-the-air TV broadcasts aren’t new in Canada, but HD broadcasts are. Analog signals have always been broadcast for free and could be harnessed with a simple antenna—bunny ears or a bent coat hanger, say. All TVs have an analog tuner to receive these signals. In June 2009, US broadcasters stopped airing analog signals, and the U.S. OTA market went 100 percent digital.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has set August 31, 2011 as the date for the digital switch in Canada. This means that broadcasters in certain markets, including Ottawa, must transmit a digital signal instead of the existing analog signals.

So, in theory, anyone with an HDTV that has a digital (ATSC) tuner can pick up HD channels without a cable subscription. HD antennas are relatively cheap (between $10 to $200) and work with a direct connection from antenna to TV, no receivers or cable boxes required. But as O’Connor found out, Ottawa’s geology imposes some limits on this simple plug-and-play functionality.

According to P.J. Francisco, who’s worked with HD antennas for a prominent retailer since OTA HD hit the market, the best that most customers in Ottawa can hope for is five of these six HD channels, and often fewer—like O’Connor’s zero channels—depending on their location and the antenna’s configuration.

“A lot of consumers are returning their HD antennas because they can’t get enough channels,” says Francisco. “With digital signals, you either get the signal or you don’t, since it comes as a binary—1 or 0—and these channels don’t come fuzzy like with an analog signal. It’s on or off.”

Four of Ottawa’s OTA HD channels are broadcast from the top of Camp Fortune in Gatineau Park, including CBC in English and French, SunTV and CityTV. The two additional channels (Omni 1 and 2) come from Herbert Corners, south of Ottawa near Osgoode. If consumers can’t get a line-of-sight to the broadcast tower, because they live in a low-lying area, like lower Sandy Hill or Old Ottawa South, for example, they aren’t guaranteed any channels.

Then, according to Francisco, the antennas come back to the stores. He notes signal strengths vary across Ottawa, but customers from all regions have reported weak signals, like O’Connor in Sandy Hill, and have returned their HD antennas. Some try outdoor antennas—which are usually stronger—while others give up on free HDTV completely, says Francisco.

Short of moving out of the neighbourhood, O’Connor’s options are to pay for digital cable or to watch the CBC.ca feed on his computer, but his situation is proof that the promised HDTV utopia is still off the market in parts of Ottawa.

How do I know which HD channels are available to me?

Enter your address into the “TV Signal Locator Tool” at TVFool.com before you buy an HD antenna to see the potential reception for your home. Be sure to put the specific height of your antenna (enter “0” for Sandy Hill/Old Ottawa South) to see which channels you should get and which kind of antenna—indoor, outdoor, roof-mounted—you’ll need. TVFool.com lists the signal strength for each HD station; channels listed in green should be okay with in indoor antenna.