What To Know About the WDEF News 12 Now Rescan July 2

If you use an antenna to watch News 12 you may lose the signal on July 2 unless you rescan your TV.

Caleb Stambaugh, News 12 Marketing/Creative Services Manager explains, “So what’s gonna happen on July 2nd at 11 am is channel 12 is actually gonna move to channel 8.”

Rescanning is straightforward and requires no new equipment or services.

“On the consumer side for the folks at home, you won’t see any difference. You tune your TV in, you’ll still see us on channel 12 and things like that. In fact if you watch us through cable satellite or an online streaming platform, you won’t have to do anything. Your provider will take care of that.”

Rick McClain, News 12’s Chief Engineer, “Everything will still show up as 12. All of our 12.1 through 4 channels will be the same. Everything’s normal there. We’re just trying to fit into spectrum. We’re all having so many new wireless gadgets, Wi-Fi’s routers, modems at home, more bandwidth, 5G coming along. The FCC’s having to pack us to make more open frequencies for new devices and we all want our new wireless gadgets. We’re doing what we were mandated to do to maintain our license to stay on the air and if all goes well, this will be seamless.”

“Your cell phone should be faster. Your smart home devices will talk to each other better and when we eventually hit the Jetsons age and we all have self-driving cars that need to talk to each other to stay out of each other’s way on the road, it’s the same bandwidth those cars will be using.”

“As television technologies has gotten better, we can put more pictures and channels in a smaller amount of bandwidth. TV stations don’t need to be spread out across the spectrum like they used to have to be and in the mid 1900s. A lot of our audience will remember that if you got channel 6 out of Atlanta and you had channel 5 here in Chattanooga, that channel 5 may bleed over on channel 6 and vice versa. That’s not an issue anymore, so TV stations can be a lot closer in number and that’s what this repack is. A few years ago the FCC came up with a plan to sell the public airwaves off. So the the airwaves that you and I used to own were sold to private to mostly cell phone companies but a few other businesses and in doing that, some TV stations decided to take a check from the FCC and go off the air and others like us decided to continue to serve the public interest and stay on the airways, but that required the FCC to move things around to make everything work. That’s what’s happening.”

“Really in the end, the viewer will have no difference.”

You may lose the signal on rescan date unless you rescan your TV. To a scan press the menu button on your tv. Select setup. Choose antenna and then click channel scan or auto tune. Your TV set or converter box will do the rest. On July 2, 11am, grab your remote control and rescan so you can keep watching News 12. Plan to rescan!

“If you need help rescanning your TV, you can visit our website wdef.com/rescan. We have a web page with instructions on how to do that. There’s even 1-888-CALLFCC (1-888-225-5322) for you to call the FCC where they have a tech support line that is staffed seven days a week from 8am to 1am and those guys can actually look up your model TV and help step you through step by step on what to rescan. You may find more channels out there that you didn’t have before because there’s new ones that coming and going just about every day now.

Of course, you don’t need to do any of this until after 11am 10am Central on July 2nd.