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Originally Posted by nasadowsk
IMHO, the FCC really jumped the gun on HDTV and DTV. Hey look, the standard was hammered out in '98.
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Actually the FCC almost went with an analog style HDTV system. Something like the Japanese MUSE HD system. Then some company announced that they could do an all digital system with compression that would make an HDTV signal fit in a 6MHz TV channel. The FCC said "Great, do some refinements, field test it and make it good, and we'll do it, an all digital HDTV standard". About the only real arguement was about the transport stream modulation onto the TV channel, 8VSB or COFDM. COFDM is a little better with ghosting, but with its 2000 or 8000 subcarriers, severe clipping in transmitters and intermod in receivers is a big problem. If all 8000 subcarriers decide to turn completely on full ampliitude at the same time, you'd have a huge power spike to try to transmit or receive without overload.