Robert Grant
03-30-2008, 01:37 PM
A small, independent electronics store around here (yes, there is one!) is offering an alternative to those CECBs made by Funai and LG.
The first thing one notices about the Sansonic FT-300A is how compact the unit is, especially height (about 1"). They did this by taking the power section out of the box, and including one of those ubiquitus "wall rat" power suppiles to provide 5 V DC to a jack on the rear.
Of interest to DXers is that one could build a battery supply to power the FT-300A and do portable DTV DX.
It was not possible to do any evaluation of it's sensitivity or multipath performance. Just when I was ready to comdemn the box, a check of the same antenna into a TV set at the store showed that what was going into the box was lousy RF in the first place.
One thing about the Sansonic was the lack of knowledge about American culture among whoever put it into production. The program guide and clock use 24-hour time format (e.g. "Judge Mathis - 14:00-14:30"), the carton and instruction book have awkward English, and the channel scan offers actual RF frequency instead of channel (using center of channel, e.g. 79.000 for channel 5 instead of 76.310). In regular use, channel selection is, of course, by PSIP virtual channel.
One true criticism is that the automatic channel scan is much slower than the LG and Funai CECBs, about a minute or two.
If anyone has had a chance to give a fair test to the Sansonic FT-300A, let me know.
73, Rob, N8NU.
The first thing one notices about the Sansonic FT-300A is how compact the unit is, especially height (about 1"). They did this by taking the power section out of the box, and including one of those ubiquitus "wall rat" power suppiles to provide 5 V DC to a jack on the rear.
Of interest to DXers is that one could build a battery supply to power the FT-300A and do portable DTV DX.
It was not possible to do any evaluation of it's sensitivity or multipath performance. Just when I was ready to comdemn the box, a check of the same antenna into a TV set at the store showed that what was going into the box was lousy RF in the first place.
One thing about the Sansonic was the lack of knowledge about American culture among whoever put it into production. The program guide and clock use 24-hour time format (e.g. "Judge Mathis - 14:00-14:30"), the carton and instruction book have awkward English, and the channel scan offers actual RF frequency instead of channel (using center of channel, e.g. 79.000 for channel 5 instead of 76.310). In regular use, channel selection is, of course, by PSIP virtual channel.
One true criticism is that the automatic channel scan is much slower than the LG and Funai CECBs, about a minute or two.
If anyone has had a chance to give a fair test to the Sansonic FT-300A, let me know.
73, Rob, N8NU.