> Digital TVs will automatically blank the bad channel out
Some digital TVs will put fake snow up when the signal is lost. I think I've seen my Samsung do it. First it says "No signal" but I think if you leave it long enough it goes to snow.
The snow was one thing that was better about analog TV. A very weak signal would show up as snow with some hints of picture. You could reposition your antenna and see if you were making progress or not.
With digital, at least on my Samsung, you don't get anything unless you have a fairly decent signal. This makes positioning an antenna a lot harder.
In theory, this can be addressed by going to the signal information screen in the diagnostics. But on my Samsung it will only show signal information for channels that it has found via its "scan for channels" function.
If you tell it to tune to a channel by number, it will do so even if that channel has never been found via a scan, but then the signal information option is greyed out on the menu.
You can change channels while on the signal information screen, but only via the channel up/down buttons on the remote, and they only step through the scanned channels.
How did it not occur to Samsung that customers might want to see the signal strength for a channel that was manually tuned to?
Further increasing my annoyance with Samsung, I have a Samsung monitor (SyncMaster T240) as my second monitor on my iMac, in the same room as the TV. If the Samsung monitor is on, I cannot get upper VHF or lower UHF channels on the TV. That's because the Samsung monitor spews a lot of strong radio interference in the low to mid 200 MHz range and in the 400-500 MHz range. On an SDR spectrum analyzer this takes the form of a bunch of narrow tall spikes evenly spread across the band, close enough together than dozens of them stomp on any TV channel in those frequency ranges.
Theoretically this is why TV manufacturers include dB meters in most all TVs now. My experience however is that those meters are not very useful because they jump around like crazy and it's hard to get a sense of just how strong the signal is.
It also seems to me that while it was pretty easy to tolerate some fuzz on an old analog station, digital artifacts and stalls pretty much ruin a show. We lost some old marginal stations with the "upgrade" to digital TV. Digital is perfect when the signal is good, but degrades much worse than analog.
Some digital TVs will put fake snow up when the signal is lost. I think I've seen my Samsung do it. First it says "No signal" but I think if you leave it long enough it goes to snow.