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Wandering Radio Reloj
Hi, NWMan and you guys! I was off the air for a while. Radio Reloj, and some other Cuban stations, are broadcast nationwide. So there must be several transmitters (in different frequencies) to cover all the territory. As you know, Cuba is a narrow island with a East-West orientation. It is possible, under certain atmospheric conditions, for several of these transmissions to reach US territory. I just tuned Radio Reloj to check, and by luck it was 3 p.m sharp, so they were reading the stationīs ID, and they no longer give you the frequency. It must be because it is not the same in all the provinces.
Regarding digital TV, the Chinese system is being implemented. At this moment, in Havana and several other cities, simultaneous broadcast are being made in NTSC and digital. Of course, the programming is still SD (NTSC). And there is an additional HD channel for tests. Only a few programmes are broadcast in it, as maybe 95% of our studio equipment is SD. I have been told that on weekends it keeps broadcasting in HD (mostly foreign football and some Cuban baseball), but my home decoder canīt receive HD. I plan on buying a new one soon, that will receive HD and also have HDMI outputs (my current set-top box is the very first model distributed in Cuba, and only has RCA outputs).
Of course, as we are using the Chinese system, US, Japanese and Korean sets canīt pick the transmissions off air. So, when you get digital TV in Cuba, you are using set-top boxes. There are a few sets specially made for Cuba, (flat-screens and CRTs also) that have the digital decoder built-in.
But for the most of our country, it is still good old NTSC. Havana is pretty well covered with digital transmissions, but as nothing has been said about turning off analog broadcasting yet, a lot of people havenīt bought the set-top decoders.
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