On Sun, 14 Nov 2004 22:27:58 GMT, PaPaPeng wrote:

On Sun, 14 Nov 2004 18:19:38 GMT, Dave Solly wrote:

The mandate is not for HDTV, it is for digital. Almost all of the digital
signals now, however, are HD. You will need a receiver that will receive
the ATSC signal and output the video and audio to your TV.


The so called HDTV in current sets is still processing NTSC
transmissions. Our current TV set should be good for at least another
10 years if not more.

How so? You mean that 8VSB signal going out is NTSC? NTSC is
scheduled to end on Dec 31, 2005, but I've seen word that it may be
exteded until sometime in 2009 (or possibly already has been).

Like Dave says the mandate is for going over to digital. Digital will
take up a lot less bandwith and yet provide a lot more services.

Actually, both NTSC and ATSC (8VSB) take up the same 6MHz of
bandwidth.

The freed bandwidth is a very valuable public commodity and can be
allocated for other than TV uses. That's also a FCC mandate.

Some of the higher UHF channels are not be assigned to DTV stations,
therefore those channels will be freed up and available for other
uses. This is the reason for DTV, it was an excuse to move some
channels around so the government could auction off the newly cleared
spectrum.