EricksonExpats wrote:This was a very thorough response. One thing that sparked my interest is my tv is from the US. When the DNA guy was here putting in the internet (bad wire in the house) he gave me an adaptor for my TV. I don't want a cable service just thought it would be nice to have some Finnish in the house from time-to-time using the free tv. I only tried a few times but no channels were found. Then I learned there was another cable that went to a satellite on the roof. That's when your response got me thinking. Do you think my US tv will still pick up signals or should I just use the tv as I do now for Netflix, Hulu and iTunes. Yes, I have VPN :-) The TV is a LG 32LK330. Thanks!
The user manual for that model is available for download
here. As would be expected from a U.S. model, the built-in tuners (NTSC/ATSC/QAM) are all intended for the North American TV standards and useless here.
But you could buy an external tuner/decoder (a digital converter box, DVB set-top box, “digibox”; there are many names for the thing!) adhering to the local standards, or even a
DVR with the same capability — that is, if you’d also like to record/timeshift the local shows, instead of merely watching them live. Whichever kind of device you’re going to get, It would connect to one of the inputs (HDMI, composite, s-video, component) on your set. Instead of running the RF cable from the wall directly to the back of your TV (which is of no use in your case as the tuners in that TV are incompatible with the local TV signals), you’d run it into the set-top box and use the remote control provided with it for changing the channels.
Now, there are a couple of catches with this approach.
First of all, you need to figure out whether the house/apartment you’re living in is connected to a cable service or, alternatively, whether it has a communal antenna system. (I assume it’s an apartment building, so you’d probably want to ask about this from the maintenance guy!) If the house subscribes to cable service, you already pay for basic cable in your rent or maintenance fee, and the cable TV RF signal is available in
the wall jack marked with the text “TV” in all apartments. With a communal antenna on the roof, it’s much the same thing: the over-the-air signal received with the antenna is amplified and distributed to the different apartments, and that signal would also end up to the “TV” jack of your apartment. Just like with the cable scenario, in the communal antenna scenario, too, you’re already paying for maintaining the communal antenna system. This is charged from you as part of the rent or the maintenance fee.
It is important to note the type of TV signal you get with an antenna is a bit different from the cable TV signal. Figuring out which kind of signal is actually provided to your apartment is therefore vital (when purchasing equipment) since many set-top boxes and DVRs in the market are only designed for a particular signal type — either the “cable” or the “antenna” signal — and they contain a tuner which can only tune to one or the other. The devices intended for over-the-air reception have a
DVB-T (“terrestrial”) tuner, whereas the devices intended for cable reception have a
DVB-C (“cable”) tuner. A DVB-T (“terrestrial”) device won’t tune into a DVB-C (“cable”) signal, and vice versa. (There are some devices which have hybrid DVB-C/T tuners, though, and they can make use of both signal types. Most of the new TVs sold in Finland are this way, but the set-top boxes and PVRs are often fixed only to a single standard.)
There’s still another catch: given the U.S. origin of your TV, whichever digital converter box (or DVR) you buy needs to have an option in the setup menu where you can set it to output its signal in the “NTSC” or 60 Hz format, which is the signal type your TV can accept. (If we are to believe the manual, your TV cannot sync down to regular European-style 50 Hz video signals, so the converter box needs to help here, converting the Finnish 50 Hz TV broadcasts to a U.S. style 60 Hz signal for your TV.) I have no idea how common this NTSC/60Hz compatibility feature actually is in the DVB set-top boxes, or in the DVRs that are generally available in Finland, but I know the specialist German DVRs sold with the “Dreambox” brand have this capability, and I recently bought a very cheap and basic, no-frills DVB-T set-top box (branded “Denver” (?)) for my parents at Clas Ohlson, and it had that option, too. (Not that I would have needed it, but there it was.)
Note that this 60 Hz / NTSC output capability is not typically mentioned in the spec sheet as it is of minor importance to the local buyers. Instead, you need to read up the manual or examine the setup menu options to find out whether the device supports this feature. Even most of the shop assistants probably cannot tell you off-hand whether some piece of equipment they sell includes such feature, but they could check it out for you if they have a floor model which is set up and ready to use.
All in all, I would recommend doing it this way:
- Ask the maintenance guy of your house whether you should get a DVB-T box or a DVB-C box for your apartment. They should know as they’re in charge of all “technical” aspects of the house.
- Decide whether you want a simple, basic set-top (digital converter) box just for watching the free channels, or a full-fledged DVR (digital video recorder) with an HDD for recording and time-shifting the shows.
- Make up your mind about whether you want to receive HD (high definition) channels or mere SD (standard definition) channels. The cheaper boxes will only do SD. The local broadcasters are still “experimenting” with HD — it’s not their main mode of broadcasting yet — but they do have some HD channels up, and some time in the future HD will become their main mode of broadcasting.
- Walk into a large home electronics chain (Expert, Musta Pörssi, Gigantti, Tekniset, Clas Ohlson, etc.) and lay out your requirements — for example, something like “Hi! I’d like to buy a basic DVB-T digibox which is not a DVR. SD quality is good enough for me; I don’t need HD channels at the moment. It needs to have a setup menu option for outputting 60 Hz NTSC compatible signal since my imported American TV can’t display 50 Hz signals.”
Note: if you buy a box which only has
a SCART connector on its back, you need
one of these (and suitable cables) for making the connections to your TV, as American TVs don’t come with SCART connectors (which is a French invention.) The adapters can typically be bought at the same places that sell the digital converter boxes. They’re also available in just about every home electronics store, or even in the supermarkets which have an home electronics aisle.
The final catch is that during the initial setup/tuning phase, the box likely
is in the 50 Hz mode, as a factory default, and not in the 60 Hz mode as would be required by your TV. So what you might additionally need is another, 50 Hz compatible screen for carrying out the setup phase! But you could buy a cheap video capture device, instead,
such as this $15 USB stick from DealExtreme, and monitor the 50 Hz picture on your PC screen during the initial setup / channel search phase.
(Who knows, with some luck, your TV set might actually support 50 Hz signals directly, as an undocumented feature. But probably not. For some reason, manufacturers often remove the 50 Hz support from the models they sell in the US market even though it’s just a software/firmware setting and supporting it would require no additional hardware or expenses. Unlike their American counterparts, modern European TV sets are all 50 Hz / 60 Hz compatible out of the box.)
• • •
Oh, if your house actually has a communal sat dish on the roof in addition to cable service or a communal antenna, you could additionally/alternatively buy a DVB-S (“satellite”) box. Those can be bought from stores which specialize in satellite viewing / dish installations. But I don’t know too much about that, and you’re not getting local (Finnish) channels that way. OK, Finnish channels are available that way, too, but only from a couple of specific operators, and you would need to subscribe to their service separately. With no such subscription, you’d still be able to watch the free European satellite channels from whatever position the dish is pointing at, but they’d mostly be German, Turkish, French, etc. channels broadcast in those languages, and have nothing to do with Finland.
• • •
It should probably be clarified that if a Finnish apartment house gets cable service at all,
the entire house (all apartments) usually subscribes to the basic cable service
by default, and with no possibility to individually opt out. The decision power about subscribing to the service belongs to the board of the house and the shared subscription fees are paid as part of the rent or maintenance fees. On top of that, you can individually subscribe to premium channel packages of your own choice.
If there’s no cable, then they typically have a communal antenna shared by all the apartments.
Some houses (such as yours?) have a communal (shared) sat dish, in addition to the communal (shared) antenna. Sometimes these systems are set up to receive only a handful of sat channels on behalf of the tenants. The channels are converted to “normal” channels, either in DVB-T or DVB-C format, and distributed in the house RF cabling, in which case you don’t need to buy a separate sat receiver in order to watch them. Another way of implementing a communal sat dish is a system where you get the signal straight from the dish to a third jack on the wall. This arrangement enables receiving a much larger number of channels (European FTA channels with diverse languages) but it also requires you to purchase a sat receiver (a receiver/decoder box adhering to the
DVB-S /
DVB-S2 standard) on your own.
The TV is a LG 32LK330. Thanks!
