"Charles" wrote in message
. ..


"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...

"Charles" wrote in message
. ..


Multipath?


Well, of course Charles, we all know in the UK that digital doesn't
suffer from multipath. In fact it's immune from everything ! The
government says so ... d;~}

Sigh. Our government "devolved" from yours.

I find multipath to be a more serious problem (compared to analog) with
many digital transmission formats. But, what do I know ... I don't work
for the government.


That's pretty much the feeling here too, Charles. When they originally
started foisting the 'digital TV revolution' on us, they ran TV adverts with
a well-known fat comedian and his knitted monkey puppet, to tell everyone
how they were going to be able to just buy a set-top box or digital TV set,
and jam it on the end of their existing UHF antenna. Well, of course, that
worked well, as you can imagine ...

Since then, the digital modulation format has changed in an effort to make
the signals more robust. Needless to say, not all existing STBs could cope
with the change in the number of carriers. It's now pretty much accepted
that in many areas of the country, in order to stand a cat's chance in hell
of receiving these transmissions, which are often contained in multiplexes
spread from one end of the band at 470 MHz to the other at around 820 MHz, a
serious antenna upgrade to a wideband ugly toast rack and new double
screened coax at a total cost of around £150 ( $280) is required. If you do
have trouble with multipath, which as you say, is not uncommon, then you can
be doubling those amounts.

Where I live, we have a clear line of site to the original analogue
transmitter about 20 miles away. We could receive perfect pictures on a
piece of wet string. Now, it needs a great big metal thing on the roof. Many
are either double stacked yagis, or the 'X' element "antighost" types. Now
the latest thing is the HD debate. Originally, the government and their
mouthpiece Ofcom (the supposedly politically independent broadcast
regulating body in the UK) said that when the analogue transmissions were
closed out, some of the additional bandspace won, would be used to allow
DTTV to carry HD broadcasts. Now, recently, they seem to have reneged on
this, and are now saying that no more space will be allocated, and a
different compression system will have to be employed, to win the necessary
space. This has gone down like a lead balloon with the manufacturers, who
have been selling "HD Ready" TV sets, based on the existing compression
scheme, for some time.

This makes it all quite clear that the whole thing is fundamentally a
government cash-raising exercise when they sell off the spectrum space for
billions to the mobile phone operators, glued on the back of a bunch of
flim-flam designed to make the public believe that they are somehow getting
a better deal than they had before.

Now that we have the same free digital transmissions available by
satellite - the new Freesat service - I can't see any point in the
terrestrial service, with all its bandwith and performance constraints,
continuing. But then, perhaps that's the intention ? Maybe I'm just being
cynical, but that would leave a 400 MHz swathe of bandspace, completely
available for sale ...

Arfa