3ABN (KUCL) is now digital.

[dxstuboy]

Its time to rescan your boxes Salt Lakers, you've got a new channel. KUCL-LD (26) is on the air, broadcasting (I believe) from their Foothill location. No wonder I saw them fudging around with the tower the other day. Not that I watch this kind of programming, but its on the air.

[dxstuboy]

The channel carries four feeds, English, Espanol and two currently blank channels that show up as 3ABN-RD and Radio74. Hmm!

[Terry]

I happened to do a re-scan yesterday and found the same thing you did. They show up labeled as channel 73 though. Is that what you see?

[dxstuboy]

Yep, 73-1 thru 4. Odd channel assignment.

[CAwasinNJ]

No sign of it here, but that's not a surprise.

That it IDs as 73 is. As far as I know the only way a virtual channel can be different from the real channel is if the digital channel is different from what the old analog channel was or if a new digital station comes on the same channel as the old abandoned analog channel. Channel 73 hasn't even been in regular use for decades. Maybe somebody screwed up the encoder?

[dxstuboy]

Is there anyone down in Provo that can confirm whether the 3ABN on Lake Mountain is still on the air or broadcasting digital now? If so, there is a possibility that I will get overlap because both stations are/used to be receivable here. I hope on 43 it actually says 43, instead of 73. I agree, something somewhere isn't set right. Also, the DT-3 and 4 channels on 26 have no programming, also a mess up?

[Terry]

Speaking of mess ups, why would channel 20 have 4 identical channels? Silliness.

Oh, and I notice that channel 10 has dropped their weather channel, which I liked. 10.1 is a stupidly halfway stretched version of the SD feed and is labeled HD. 10.2 is some shopping thing. 10.3 is now the straight SD feed of Telemundo.

I guess that they just don't think much about how their stuff looks.

[kenglish]

Hmmmm...
So, it looks like they flash-cut. They originally had a CP to simulcast on RF channel 8.

When I talked to their Engineering folks about 6 months ago, they said there would be two TV channels, English and Spanish, and two radio channels, English and Spanish. KUCL is owned by the local church. The Provo station is owned by 3ABN. I sort of expected the Provo to go Digital first. Maybe they are doing all the area ones at once.

I think channel 10's weather machine may be down.
As for channel 20, I suspect that the extra channels are available for other programming. It's probably easier to just leave them up than to expect folks to rescan for new ones.

Too bad that all broadcasters don't have an agreement to "snipe" an on-screen announcement telling people "There are new FREE TV channels available. Re-scan your set.".

[CAwasinNJ]

The downside to having 4 identical channels is that a lot of people will just set the ignore bit on the duplicates for when they're channel surfing. If something new comes on they won't know. Even worse, if they have to rescan for some other reason then they would have to notice new channels that were added. If they were already added and ignored they won't be any the wiser. I think that's a bad move, but I don't run KTMW. The best thing would have been to have all of the planning done beforehand and just put up 4 different services if that's what the plan was. It's not like the transition was sprung on everyone overnight.

[dxstuboy]

I agree, they should have planned it out before flipping the switch. There is a wealth of programming out there they could air. I wonder why the other stations aren't taking advantage of the multiple channels. There are at least four stations I can receive that don't have any sub channels.

I would like to see a return of TheHive. KUCW could do nicely with that.