Many if not most homeowners who are trying to now get over the air HDTV
reception are finding that indoor antennas are not adequate and often need
to use expensive outdoor antennas.



Ironically, the entire problem could have been avoided if the FCC had proper
engineering people who had chosen / demanded higher transmitter power and
transmitting antenna type and site choices.



By increasing the effective radiated power by another 6 to 9 dB, they would
have put a much smaller burden on the homeowner antenna, and lowered the
deployment cost and risk for the homeowner tremendously.



I gotta' believe that the choices they made were driven by sparing the
broadcasters the extra operating costs of consuming all the extra kilowatt
hours.



The FCC would, if challenged, probably claim that they kept the ERP to a
small number to prevent co-channel interference between neighboring cites.



But in the UHF spectrum, they have so vastly more spectrum to allocate that
they could have very, very easily chosen clear channels for every neighbor,
and allowed homeowners to use simple rabbit ears and bow ties rather than
need outdoor directional antennas even in urban and suburban areas to get
all the local programming.



Colin Powell's son, an attorney, headed the FCC during the HDTV planning and
transition. Talk about technical qualifications for the job.............



Smarty