In article .com,
wrote:
Does anyone know if it is true that the present VHF TV band will be
disbanded when HDTV finally takes over? What will then occupy those low
band frequencies? And what will be the new fequency allocations?

Hit www.fcc.gov, there's tons of stuff on DTV there. (Check the pages
for the Media Bureau). They'll probably auction off the unused channels,
or allocate some of them to land mobile. But I've heard that it's a
market by market thing that happens when some percentage of households
are digital equipped in each area.

Also
is there any hope for those of us who would like to keep our existing
NTSC equipment? There was talk of converter boxes being made available.

They've been available for several years now. But the ones I've seen
were priced from $500 down to $250. (I haven't looked for about a year).
The big box electronics stores are loath to point them out. (I assume
that's because the subscription satellite TV companies give them a
kickback that the local "free to air" stations can't). Poke around
the corners of the local big box store and see if they have a Samsung
SIR-T351 or something like that. The buzzword for the salesman is
"ATSC Tuner". There are, I think, also dual mode boxes that will do
both terrestrial and satellite. (Welcome to the service economy.
You're not supposed to go out make a one time buy of a simple box,
you're supposed to pay each month, forever...).

Will this be the case and will they be reasonably priced? Or are they
perhaps a home brew project that we might be able to build ourselves?

There's a zillion bytes of RAM, and a whole lot of CPU cycles needed
to unpack the signal. That's the problem now. The ATSC standard is
too much of a resource hog if the equipment has to handle the largest
resolution signal. Which is has to do, even it it scales it down to
NTSC resolution. That's why the satellite or cable digital TV systems
can undercut the prices for their proprietary box. They can send out
a lower res. signal that doesn't need as much memory/CPU and still call
it HDTV.

The whole mess is in the "early adopter" phase, where they're soaking
the guys that have to be "the first one on the block" for as much as
they can for their big screen sets and Media PCs. Real soon now, (now
that everybody has a DVD player), digital TV will be "the next big
thing".

Mark Zenier
Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)