Digital Television may not be coming soon!
 

I attended our local monthly broadcast engineers meet today (SBE) and the big topic of the day is the digital changeover for next month. Well, it seems that there are a lot of problems yet to be worked out. Mainly, the converters may or may not work properly. It seems if you program a particular channel in, the station will not be there or found on another channel. People who are way out say 20 miles or more may not get anything. We talked about other problems with them as well.

Also, the gov't is out of those coupon cards and you will be placed on a waiting list with no one knowing if/when they will be available again.

There seems to be an inherent problem with the Funai converters that are sold by Sams/Walmart under the Magnavox name. Funai is aware of it and this has gone all the way to congressmen. What a mess this is going to be if you are not on cable! It is very likely the date for the changeover will be pushed back again. Let's wait and see.

Also there will be one analog station in most markets called a "lighthouse" station. It will be kind of like a Civil Defense station and will also have to broadcast in spanish.

I'm not real sure what is to happen but what have some of you heard who are in broadcast?

Who the hell is in charge of this unholy mess ? Larry, Moe, & Curley ? They've only had 5, 10, 15, 20 (pick one) years to get this sorted out...Damn, what a trainwreck..And trust me, Julian, I'm NOT raggin' on you or the other broadcast people...This fiasco is entirely of The Gummint's making. I'm gonna stop now, before I get political.

I hear the President Elect is going to postpone the deadline. The Commerce department ran out of coupons for the converter box give away. (No money left in the budget.) What a mess!

Here is a link to the story...
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/CA6627445.html
HERE WE GO!!!

Can someone explain to me (and anyone else unclear on the subject) just WHY it is/was so important to Make The Switch? Is it to free up more bandwidth in that range of RF? And if so, what for?

The transition WILL happen. The program has had one major tweak to allow people in nursing homes to get coupons. I expect another tweak will fix the current coupon problem (with some delay) by a vote to allow recycling the expired coupons.

Not sure what you mean by "Mainly, the converters may or may not work properly. It seems if you program a particular channel in, the station will not be there or found on another channel. " As far as I know, the converter boxes work as designed, that is, they display the station's historic channel number (unless the station has programmed it into its data incorrectly). All the boxes have a menu item to scan for active channels, so the user does not need to "program a particular channel." There is one slight hitch left in that some stations are changing frequency after the analog shutdown, so people need to re-scan the channel line-up on their converter or DTV on Feb. 18. A few PBS stations that can go to their new assignment early are doing so and shutting off analog in January. The Zenith and Insignia boxes (and I believe others) even have a choice to add channels without redoing the whole scan.

I know people love to rag on the government, but except for Congress not anticipating and providing for people who procrastinate, they and the broadcast industry have been doing an excellent job in getting the word out, and in most cases the coupon contractor has been doing well on the coupon program. In fact, most people I come in contact with these days are saying "enough already with the messages."

IMO, the only thing wrong with all the publicity to date is that it didn't say "convert now" instead of "convert on Feb 17" The digital signals are available and have been available for months. Have you converted your mother. grandfather, great uncle yet? If not, shame on you! You are a greater problem than Congress! You are the guru in your circle of acquaintances. You should be finding out if there are any problems beforehand, not after analog shuts down.

So, yeah, the bill was written a little goofy, but the program as a whole appears to have worked very well even given the limitations that were put on it by Congress.

So that the spectrum can be auctioned for money-making mobile services and some freed for public service. There is an intense demand for more mobile spectrum, which could not be realized with bandwidth-hungry analog TV in place. Public service radio in particular, keeps goign through a series of stumbles in which various emergency agencies cannot communicate with each other, and the availability of new bandwidth at least gives the opportunity to develop new systems that would allow cooperation of different levels of government.

I knew it had to have something to do with the dollar value of that particular piece of the spectrum...

Thanks.

There are some (mostly smaller) stations that "hot-swapping" their analog and digital signals - shutting the old analog down and simultaneously bringing the digital system online - so in some markets, not all channels are currently available as a digital broadcast yet.

Sweden managed to move cars from the left side to the right side of the road,
so the U.S. should be able to do this transition. Good luck.

A pity I can't comment on the general idea of auctioning spectrum: that would
be politics...

Interesting, did not know that. Excellent example
 

Hehehe.

No surprise that the Magnavox box has issues...I bought one and it is by far the worst of the bunch. Not nearly as user-friendly as the Insignia or DigitalStream that I have, and the lack of analog pass through hinders its usefullness right now. I am more optimistic about digital than I was 6 months ago, mostly because now that stations are switching to full power digital I can see that reception won't be a major problem; at least I'll be able to get the stations I could before, plus the addition of subchannels. 2 of the 3 locals have shut off their analog transmitters already.

On the other hand, tonight I got a call from my stepmother. She has a fairly new LCD set and Dish network. Over the holidays I had to add a splitter so they can watch local stations. Well, for some reason today it's not working. Looks like I have to make time tomorrow to ride over there and see what's wrong.

To me, the problem is not the converter boxes. I have been using several different models for almost a year now. The problem is that DTV has inherant weaknesses vs analog that could be life threatining. From my experience, it simply craps out in bad weather, not matter what converter box you are using(I am 30 miles from the transmitters). This can be critical in tornado alley. (If any of you say "radio", when was the last time you heard a weather warning on commercial radio or saw a radar picture on a weather radio!!).

In addtion there are millions of people(many low income of jobless now) who could not receive DTV(due to where they live) even if given a new ATSC ready TV and antenna. Is essentially stealing their TV so corporations can buy the spectrum and then sell it back to use fair?

Banning analog TV broadcast either one of the stupidest or crookest communications realated ideas to come out of government in a long time(probably since Armstrong was screwed by Sarnoff on FM radio after WWII).

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I've been getting quite a few digital stations for a few years now. Some from as far away as 90 miles using my Hughes HIRD-E8 and a rotatable roof mounted antenna. The nice thing about the HIRD-E8 is that I can view HDTV broadcasts and convert them to standard.

I did apply for a coupon. Since they've run out it'll probably be sometime before I get one.

However, I would expect a large glut of digital converters on craigslist and ebay in a couple of years for nearly free or free as people replace their sets.

John