[mythtvnz] Help with terrestrial channels (non-MythTV)

[Bryan Ischo]

Hi all.  First my apologies because I am not actually a MythTv user (yet)=
,
I am just trying to figure out how terrestrial television in New Zealand
works, because I can't understand what my TV is doing, and I expect that
if anyone knows this stuff, it's the MythTv guys.

(for what it's worth, I was a software developer at TiVo until December
last year when I quit to move to NZ - so I know something about PVRs (or
DVRs as we call them :) and look forward to enjoying MythTv once I get
some free time to set it up)

I have a Sony trinitron CRT television that I inherited from the previous
owner of this house.  It is a nice TV but I don't understand its channel
mappings, and the remote control doesn't seem to have any way to program
the channel selections.  But given my prior experience with trying to
program a TV in NZ, I think that may be a good thing :) - to whit:

In the apartment that I was renting when I first got to New Zealand (in
January) there was this super ancient Sony 13 inch TV that was programmed
to tune to channels 1 through 15 or so via channel up/down (meaning, you
could enter other numbers manually, but channels 1 - 15 were available vi=
a
channel up and down).  Some of these channels contained static, and some
contained real channels (but never at the expected number - for example
TvOne was on channel 5 I believe), and some contained duplicates of other
channels.  I can't remember the actual map but it was something like,
channels 5, 6, and 13 all had TvOne.  Or something like that.

Anyway, one day I got adventurous and tried some of the front panel
buttons which seemed like they were for programming the TV.  I didn't
understand the text but managed to start the auto-scan feature for
detecting channels.  The TV went through all the channels and I ended up
with a *completely different* channel map that went 1 - 17, and 28, and
yet was no better than my first map; same channels, but in different
places, and with different duplicates and static channels.  Whatever, I
could still get all of the channels available to me (I think), I just had
to re-memorize that TvOne was on 3 now, and Maori TV on 17 now, and prime
on 1 and 28, etc.

OK now fast forward to the house I just bought, where I have another
(different) Sony TV - this one at least is 30 inches or so (what's that i=
n
cm?  must be 75 or so I guess).  This one has no obvious way to scan for
new channels and no obvious way to add channels to the channel map.  And =
I
know that I'm missing some channels that I used to get at my apartment,
but the two locations are only about 2 km apart so I think they should be
receiving the same stuff.  And I have TvOne on no fewer than FIVE seperat=
e
channels.  Anyway, my question is this:

WTF is up with TVs in New Zealand?  Why can't they scan for channels in a
way that makes sense?  Why are some channels duplicated on my TV?  Why do
TVs here make it so difficult to set up a reasonable channel map?  Is my
experience typical or am I just not understanding what's going on here?=20
For once, something in the USA is simpler: terrestrial broadcasts in the
USA are generally tuned to on the channel number that they broadcast on,
and TVs "just work" when you do a channel scan.

Much thanks to anyone who can clue me in.  By the way, I may be crazy but
I prefer NTSC.  PAL flicker is driving me crazy :)

Thanks!
Bryan

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Bryan Ischo                bryan@ischo.com            2001 Mazda 626 GLX
Hamilton, New Zealand      http://www.ischo.com     RedHat Fedora Core 5
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