Comcast Digital Cable Technical Question--Simultaneous OTA channel drop-offs

[Tim from Springfield IL]

I'm not much of a techie, but I wonder if any of you with digital cable (particularly fellow Comcast customers) have noticed or heard of anything similar. (I will be having a service call on this next week).

Anyway, for the last few weeks, on only the TV in my apartment, all of the OTA stations would drop off frequently per hour for several seconds (but the regular cable networks, including digital, would not experience signal losses). I tried calling Comcast an hour ago and the operator did a reset of my digital box (a 2 1/2 year old Motorola, with no DVR), but the drop-offs have gotten worse and more frequent since then. Now on my bedroom TV (which is still analog cable only--I don't use a second digital box), I don't lose signal on my OTA channels at all.

Sorry to appear confusing (as again, I'm not a techie), but do you think this could be an issue with the digital cable box I have been provided with (ever since getting digital cable in July 2006 back in the Insight days), particularly after many upgrades and additional HD program offerings that have been added on Springfield's Comcast lineup since then? Thanks in advance for your advice.

 

[ShawnHill1]

I'm not a techie myself, but making an educated guess...it could very well be the box. When we had digital cable in our house (Time Warner Cable, just after the conversion from Comcast here in La-La Land), at least for my HD digital box, it would often freeze up or even cut on and off. After about a week of that madness, I took the box back to TWC and exchanged it for another HD converter. After that, I had no more problems with it. The boxes we had, at least for HD, were Scientific Atlanta (TWC locally uses the Motorola standard digital boxes as well).

 

[w9wi]

I'm not much of a techie, but I wonder if any of you with digital cable (particularly fellow Comcast customers) have noticed or heard of anything similar. (I will be having a service call on this next week).

Anyway, for the last few weeks, on only the TV in my apartment, all of the OTA stations would drop off frequently per hour for several seconds (but the regular cable networks, including digital, would not experience signal losses). I tried calling Comcast an hour ago and the operator did a reset of my digital box (a 2 1/2 year old Motorola, with no DVR), but the drop-offs have gotten worse and more frequent since then. Now on my bedroom TV (which is still analog cable only--I don't use a second digital box), I don't lose signal on my OTA channels at all.

Sorry to appear confusing (as again, I'm not a techie), but do you think this could be an issue with the digital cable box I have been provided with (ever since getting digital cable in July 2006 back in the Insight days), particularly after many upgrades and additional HD program offerings that have been added on Springfield's Comcast lineup since then? Thanks in advance for your advice.

I don't think it's the box.

I can think of two possible failure modes for the box that could cause this:
- it's losing the ability to receive at certain frequencies while continuing to operate at others.
- it's not receiving the authorization signal from the headend to receive these channels.

#1 is not a way in which electronics typically fail.
#2 is also rather unlikely in that it would have to lose authorization for just *some* channels -- and the very channels that are authorized on *every* subscriber's box.

To know for sure you're probably going to have to ask your neighbors whether they're observing the same thing. I'd bet they are.