D B TV
This posting is intended as a rant. A rant, like any good philippic, for which I endeavor to be as unreasonable as I can be. Difficult for someone born - somewhat by nature - to a libra mentality. Here I give the observations of a suburban broadcast TV viewer as the shift is made to Digital Broadcast TV. I have never had cable and intend to watch whatever broadcast TV offers until it finally disappears altogether, like a cheshire cat. My friend Trân, having burnt bridges with the local cable concern, opted to continue television through a satellite dish arrangement, and threw her converter box coupon away with a laugh. Cable etal, is a near infinite variety of the finite. You have to pay for it (I can scarcely afford this DSL line), and they show commercials. The digital propagations that comprise the new system are fragile signals, subject to considerable weather degradations and antenna placement issues. It is nearly possible, perhaps possible, to simply wave these signals away. By hand. Any breeze over 8-mph produces pixelated breakup. Rain or wind above 15 mph results in screen freeze or a "No Signal" message across all (nominally) available channels. Additionally antennas, rabbit ears or what have you, must be repositioned between viewing channels on transmitters at different locations. It is true that when you are receiving a signal the picture is excellent and free of the snow, static and double-imaging that plagued analog broadcasts. And I do like the weather channels (the .2 channels) that grow like kudzu off the big city stations. But the intermittent signal loss which runs between 10 and 50 percent, points to an impossibility of following narrative programing. Above 20 percent intermittency you are missing scene set-up shots and either the subject, predicate, verb, or adjective out of every line of dialog. The only programming that can be followed under these conditions is baseball. This struggle is compounded logarithmically if you try this in a rural area. I can walk outside, go across the street to some high ground and see the tower these radio waves are supposedly emanating from. My sister Ann recently emailed me a link to an article in the Everett (Snohomish County) Herald
HeraldNet: For antenna users, there's a dark side to digital TV which offered some confirming observations on the delicate nature of the digital signal. "[T]he little-known downside of converting to a more technologically advanced yet weaker broadcasting system." is how the author Amy Rolph describes it. Later she quotes Jay Zacharias, assistant chief engineer for KCPQ: ""If people have a good line of sight from their antennas to our antennas, they should get a good signal."" So if you can see the signal tower you should be alright. Perhaps they should just mount jumbo-trons to the towers and cut out the middle man. The comments from the readers that follow the article are noteworthy too. The first commenter claims interim DBTV is often using UHF spectrum on lower power: All current digital TV broadcast is on UHF frequencies, even the ones from VHF channels ... After June 19th the VHF frequencies will also be converted to digital TV use. At that time the signals should be almost as strong as the old ones...Even though the current digital channels include VHF channels the digital broadcasts are all on UHF right now. When they quit analog broadcast then they can use the bandwidth to broadcast digital TV on the real VHF channels.
Another commenter claims he has been informed that interim D B TV is using non-optimum tower installations while analog is still in service. I strongly suspect that something like this is true, that the transition period is full of compromises and scaffolding that will fall away when analog is no longer obligated. At the same time the robust VHF spectrum that transmitted analog was auctioned off for cell carriers and isn't coming back. Thinking about this I was again struck by what little information really lay in what was coming out of the federal government on this. Maybe I wasn't looking deep or hard enough. Maybe it took more than parsing the consumer palaver of the DTV's pages
Digital TV Transition: What You Need to Know About DTV . It needed listening deeply to the voice of the shuttle; those second, third and fourth links in off these web pages, where you hear the government talking to itself, and to its first public: industry. I have noted a transition in the governments outreach and internet information from 'how to obtain and hook up a box'
TV Converter Box Coupon Program Website, to 'how to a catch signals' The Digital TV Transition: Fix Reception Problems. There is more focus on antennas Antennas and Digital Television both large and small AntennaWeb. I saw an public service advertisement for a service the FCC offers from their suite of pages (which I had already discovered on my own). The FCC's
The Digital TV Transition: DTV Reception Maps. This is FCC data overlaid on a Google maps interface. It was this type of data from the FCC that that the Herald article above was responding to. This is the GIS revolution in motion. For any area entered, a list of stations in the market(s) involved appear in a list on the left. They are color coded by their estimated received strength, clicking on the call signs makes an icon representing the tower appear on the map with a line to your location, with bearing and distance. Along with this you get numbers of effective power expressed in kW, and receive power in dBm. Since these are undefined technical terms they are useful here only as measures of relative efficacy. In a cursory examination I'd say if a station's receive power in dBm (expressed as a negative number) is weaker than -36 (higher) you won't get that station with a pair of rabbit ears. Another set of data that comes with this page is whether a station is planning any major upgrades, or is operating on a weak or UHF frequency in the interim, and will only go to full power after June 2009. Dependent, it seems, on the information from the relevant Form 387s filtering down to this level. The FCC has more comprehensive coverage of these matters on their maps book pages
Map Book of All Full-Power Digital Television Stations Authorized by the FCC. These include the pre and post transition coverage of all broadcast stations in the U S, and an additional separate map book of FP station with significant changes in coverage
Map Book For Full-Power Digital Television Stations Having Significant Changes in Coverage. These maps by market, station, and network measure points where coverage is gained, where it is lost but where the content is covered, and lost with no direct substitute from another content provider. Judging by the DC area and the Milton/Lewes De areas the only two I'm familiar with, all this suffers from a singularly creative level of optimism. The FCC also seems to have assumed that if signal strength in an area ought to be at a certain level, according to their standard model - then it is. If terrain or a dense curtain of urban buildings obstruct this, they don't count it. Although those hills and those buildings aren't going anywhere. In many area's they point to significant coverage gain in the periphery, but the receive power there is -66 dBm. That signal is only available if you choose to mount an amplified outdoor antenna the requisite 20 to 30 ft above surrounding terrain. Otherwise the drifting "No Signal" tag will be your tv companion. (I've found I can change the border color of the no signal tag, and often amuse myself by this)
There is strong indication between the lines that the engineers and bureaucrats knew this replacement was less adequate. Offhand I don't know whether it is better to believe they were so blinded by the industry's pressure to make this happen, the corporate and institutional gains that would roll forth if they ignored it, or that they were so incompetent that they didn't see it at all. Either way I only see it as dereliction of professional ethics, and abandonment of fiduciary responsibilities.
Moreover I see a governing assumption lurking in the background of all this that the overwhelming majority of the American population would switch to cable or satellite at this point leaving only a small rump population on broadcast who could be safely ignored. Forming only an minor adjunct to an industry that would center itself on other ways and means elsewhere. I am inclined to regard this as, at the least, a malfeasant expectation, and not synonymous with mere technological advancement - whatever that is believed to mean. I see this as favoring cable and parallel non-public providers long term aims concerning content (rights) management and control against the interests of the American public. It is all a haphazard swindle.
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