aemeijers wrote:
wrote:
On Jan 13, 10:45�am, "Percival P. Cassidy"
wrote:
I can no longer find the message, but I'm sure that it was on one of
these two newsgroups within the past few days that I read an allegation
that the move from analog to digital for TV broadcasting was a plot to
push vast numbers of people to cable or satellite because the digital
signal is receivable only over a very small area.
it was all about the money the congress critters could get.
I mentioned this allegation to a broadcast engineer yesterday. He told
me that in fact many people are not getting good reception of the OTA
digital signals and are moving to cable or satellite because many of the
expensive HD TVs on the market have appallingly insensitive antenna
inputs -- far inferior to the almost-free converter boxes that were
distributed over the last couple of years.
Perce
There are proposals to elminate OTA tv completely and let the
broadcasters sell the banwidth or most of it for cell phones etc.
Uh, other than the leases recently auctioned off, the broadcasters
don't own the bandwidth to sell it.
By definition and case law, the airwaves are public property.
That your congress critters have been selling off for you
for the last 15 years, starting at channel 83. I can't find
the cite right now, but the final hdtv goal was all
transmitters would be in old ch 14 thru 51 allotment. Which
could work well with a lightweight, compact and efficient
UHF fan dipole antenna.
The original FCC hdtv reception studies (mid 90's) in
several major markets didn't work out as well as expected
with lower power transmitters. Either more power, or roof
top antennas would be needed. The Baltimore tests were
worst, too hilly of a terrain. A neighborhood could have
both a too strong of a signal and a too weak signal in the
same block. Some places the test equipment worked better
with no antenna connected, others, a window screen worked
better. Signal reflections were bad. The report is an
interesting read and in the fcc.gov archive.
Last numbers were 74% of the DTV stations on UHF (14-51),
24% on high VHF (7-13) and less than 2% on Low VHF(2-6).
With the virtual channel system, the actual frequency can be
changed as needed to improve coverage and reduce station
co-interference. channel 6-1 can always be channel 6-1 but
transmit anywhere between about 500MHz to 700MHz.
Smells like urban legend to me.
--
aem sends...