TV as LCD monitor in shack

[Tom S]

Anyone else here using a TV as a computer monitor in the shack?  My 17" LCD monitor died a while back so I went back to using an old 15" or so CRT I dug out of the garage, and it's hard on my crappy eyesight.  Last night my wife bought me an early Father's Day present, a 19" TV with VGA input.  

My main concern, of course, is RFI.  The TV we got is a cheaper one, so I don't know how well it's shielded.  Of course, I'm going to add some large ferrite beads to the cables to cut down on any spurious signals, but hopefully it won't put out noise like some TV's do.

I haven't hooked it up to my computer yet because I need to get a male-male VGA cable, but I did hook it up to my discone antenna and managed to see 10 local DTV stations.  Which leads me to my second question, what are the frequencies for the new TV channels?  I would like to build an antenna just for TV.

[ChrisSmolinski]

Fundamentally, an LCD TV and monitor are pretty much the same, so I don't expect any major differences in QRM, other than the cheaper models are likely to be worse, as with everything.

One potential issue could be that the resolution of a TV may be less than a monitor?

The same TV bands are used as from the analog days, with the exception that I believe the upper UHF channels were re-allocated to public service. So your standard VHF/UHF TV antenna will still work.

[Tom S]

I haven't done a lot of tuning around yet, but so far I haven't noticed any noise attributable to the TV/monitor.  I remember hearing some noise a while back from one of our TV's, but I think it was the TV/DVD player combo in our kids' room.

The resolution is pretty sharp.  It looks just like a regular LCD monitor.  And the digital TV is also very sharp and high quality.

It was my understanding that the TV frequencies changed when they all went digital, but all the searching online for TV channel frequencies still brings up the old analog information, such as the audio for TV channel 2 being at 59.750 MHZ, etc.

I do have an old TV antenna I salvaged from a condemned house so I'll probably put it up and use it.

One good thing about using the TV as opposed to a regular LCD monitor, aside from being able to watch TV in the shack, is that it has an input for audio from the computer, so I do away with the computer speakers I had hooked up to listen to audio from the radios being fed into the computer.  If I need it quiet, I just hit the mute button on the remote.

[Tom S]

Well I'm happy to report that so far I don't see any noise from the TV, even on the SDR.  I haven't yet scanned the entire HF spectrum, but what I've listened to so far yields good results.

Now if I could only get the power company to do something about their noisy lines...