Digital TV (Again)

So, the DTV transition is on the way, no stopping now.

For those of you who have been following along, I've been a bit upset with the whole DTV thing, not just because I think it's a huge waste of money and time, but also because of the major technical deficiencies in the DTV standard we're going to be using, ATSC.

On January 20th, there was an event in Washington, DC, it was a pretty big deal. You know, the sort of a big deal you might want to watch with your kids, the sort of a big deal that you think might be a great way to test the complicated huge freaking antenna and low-loss feedline and fancy DTV tuner device you bought for the computer big deal kind of big deal.

On the Analog system, I got a snowy, but viewable NBC and CBS out of Philly, and a snowy, but viewable ABC and FOX out of NY, depending on which way the antenna pointed.

On the Digital system...well, words escape me, so I took screen shots:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/30796655@N08/

I get channel 69, which shows 4 variations of useless, and channel 39, which will help me learn more Spanish from an anthropomorphic bird-thing. Great, just great.

If this is the DTV I can expect in the future, I'm just going to cut the antenna down and put it into the recycling bin.

We got a live feed via Hulu.com just fine, but I know that in an emergency situation, I can't count on land-based connectivity or even 3g wireless.

What a mess.

The basic rule for technological progress needs to be "Never accept something new unless it does everything the old system did well and advances from there." It's like VoIP phone calls and 911 service - what a mess that is too.

I am still worried. The TV in the living room of our home on wheels is digital capable, and we are within 60 miles of three TV stations. Two come in fine on our antenna, analog isn't all that great, but digital is so sharp and clear it almost looks like 3D. The thirds analog is so-so, the digital channel shows "no signal" 90+% of the time. So come the 18th we won't be able to watch that channel (happens to be ABC, our least used of the big three anyway) at all, or very little...

After a decade of cable/sat tv, I am just about ready to go back to free broadcast again. The programming is getting so ridiculously bad these days, half of the channels I am paying for now are non-stop infomercials. What ever happened to getting what you pay for? Were I being affected right now economically, the dish would be the first thing in the junk pile for sure.

As for the big digital conversion, if it don't work, then I guess I will have more free time on my hands to read, work on hobbies, fix up house, sleep, or go out with the wife. Besides, I own a few hundred videos now, so it'd be just as easy for me to cycle though my collection commercial free as it is to sit and watch Turner's various incarnations hack a classic all to pieces so as to stuff more advertising in between, at 6 db higher audio to boot. Annoying to say the least.

commercials aren't 6db higher, they are simply ultra-compressed at or near maximum. I used to MAKE commercials, I know you can't exceed 0db and I know how the final audio pass was to super-compress and optimize the voice frequency and phase to be more "punchy". But it's NEVER actually louder.

What were people expecting?

DTV is a broadcast standard... NOT a content standard. If you didn't like what was on before, you certainly aren't going to like what's on afterwards.


And as far it goes it's a damn good broadcast standard. It makes the following possible:
* High-def quality (we currently lag behind the rest of the world in TV picture quality
* Discrete surround sound
* Multi-casting
* Interactive TV
* OPEN standard that can grow (unlike the 70 year old handcufffs we suffered from)

But it is not, and was never intended to be a content standard. In fact, if you think about it the quality of some content might go down! Broadcasters struggle with finding enough quality stuff to put on one station, certainly now that they can mulit-cast you can bet there will be some trash on the alternate channels.

But like all new technologies, some companies will rise to the top. Think about this as a possibility...

You are watching the local news on say channel 3. Well now you might watch channel 3.1 if you live in the west hills of the city or 3.3 if you live south. Why? Well 80% of the broadcast might be the same, but when they get to high school sports, or local weather, or community interest they can customize the content if they wish. This is just one example, but it speaks to the kinds of possibilities the DTV standard offers.

But in the end, it's a broadcast standard. It's up to the content providers and the business sense of the broadcasters which pieces of the standard they are going to take full advantage of... or simply do the minimum. Economics, not the standard is the bad guy here.

We have been doing some grandkid sitting lately, my daughter has sat with several add-ons, got a jillion channels, and half the time there is nothing better to watch than a Law and Order re-run. Makes us glad once again that we canceled our sat service. Instead of paying $80 a month for crappy service, we buy $80 worth of $5 DVD's at Wallyworld...

All I know is, if the price goes up, I'm out. I pay for basic cable now, only $20 or so a month, and think its a huge ripoff. If they plan on charging me more, I will cut my cable out completely, and likely spend less down time doing nothing. Personally, I think its creating a "needed market", not that we need it. Kind of like the high def radio, or satellite radio...the market didnt exist for it before, but it does now, and lots of people buy into the hype. Me, I refuse to pay for something (radio in this case) that is free. Besides, I like listening to MY music; not whats on the radio. I just think that hyping this HDTV crap is over the edge, but, thats MHO.

TV was designed to be free as well, the ads are to pay for it. But someone got the idea to put up their own antenna and run wires from it and charge for that service and now we have cable where we pay for "free" programming and still have the ads that pay for the programming. It appears to me someone figured out how to double dip.

And, as a broadcast standard, it's [censored]-POOR. Absolutely, unequivocally [censored] POOR, and if you buy the BS about "interactive" I have bridge in NYC you can buy. ATSC is a terrible, terrible technical standard. It performs poorly in NYC where I've tried with a wide range of equipment, it performs poorly out here in Bucks County, PA and where it does work, I've seen pristine, clear signals simply vanish for no reason at all. It seems prone to rain & snow fade too.

OK, the gloves are off, because this is the second "digital transition" that I'm going to suffer - the first was, and remains, much more serious, and it was the transition from Analog Fire Radios to Digital system.

The parallels are incredible.

- When we switched to digital fire radios, we lost coverage in areas that had coverage before.
- When we switched to digital television, we lost coverage in areas that had coverage before.

- The new digital fire radios allegedly allowed us to do so much more - on the fly talk groups, encryption, multi-agency single system - and they can - if they can get a signal to the repeater and back, which about 50% of the time, they can't.
- The new digital televisions allegedly allow us to do so much more - high def, discrete surround sound, multi-casting - if they can get and hold a signal, which 50% of the time, they can't.

- The new digital radios required us to buy, at great expense, all new equipment to replace equipment that was working fine.
- The new digital televisions require us to buy, at some expense, all new equipment to replace equipment that was working fine.

Look, I'm not a total free-market maniac, but I can't help but notice that we made the transition from VHS to DVD with no government mandates. In the radio world, they are doing their best to push their version of Digital Radio (HD Radio) but nobody is seriously talking about shutting down AM radio stations any time soon.

If Digital TV is so great - then let it stand on its own merits. this whole program reeks of "meals in a pill" technologists run amok.

If only the world had accepted the British High Definition 1000 line analog full colour Stereo Baird TV technology standard in 1948 (yes HDTV in 1948), but instead we in the UK got the pre second WW11 425 line B/W (UK was essentially bankrupt in 1948 and couldn't afford its implementation, Oh how things change ) then the full colour 625 line PAL colour standard in 1967, which I guess would have already qualified as being somewhat Hi-def compared to the 525 line NTSC broadcast standard. The UK PAL broadcast system is being replaced by the DVB-T standard but is being rolled out slowly over a period of about 4 years.

Switching from Analog to a digital broadcast standard over the whole country the size of the USA on the same day does sound a bit mad though!!

Its your patriotic duty to accept the ATSC DTV, as I'm sure you wouldn't want to fall behind technologically with countries such as Iran, Morocco, Angola, Vietnam or Egypt.

If the DTV terrestrial broadcast signal is very weak, don't you have a free satellite broadcast such as the equivalent of the European DVB-S service which broadcasts the same channels you would have picked up using your UHF antenna.

As for the TV content in the UK, thank God for BBC (none of that Capitalist advertising every 15 minutes )!!

I get all my TV, what little I watch regularly, over the air, OTA, with a moderately large antenna perched on top of 30' of conduit. An antenna rotator and line amplifier complete the rig. The whole thing cost about what my neighbors pay for cable in around three months.

With digital TV the rotator is pretty important. A few degrees can make a real difference as digital TV is essentially go/no-go. You either get enough signal to assemble a nearly perfect picture or you get nothing at all.

With analog the picture would degrade until you had snow with just a hint of a picture you could just about make out if you squinted just right and used your imagination. With digital it is pretty much all or nothing.

So far I get more channels but lost NBC. No big loss, the only show I liked was "Dexter", and a few sources seem to say that come Feb 17 NBC will have digital service in this area.

I found these sites helpful when determining where to point my antenna:

http://www.antennaweb.org/aw/Address.aspx

http://www.tvfool.com/

It may well be beneficial to put back the transition date from February to June, as I'm pretty sure its bound to save a few lives. (as hundreds of people throughout the land fall off slippery wet icy roof tops trying to install or fix their antenna on the big day in a few weeks time )

Now its pushed back to Jun 12th:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29020391/

I'm inlcined to agree with Martin in general. With traditional analog, I could get a 12 db sinad with as little as .3 microvolts on most mainline systems. When we went to digital conversion, I figure I lost as much as 5 db of usable signal as the digital systems would struggle to decode much below .5 or even .6 microvolts. Even at that level, the cut out was usually more than most users would tolerate. With analog, you'd get static at 12 db sinad, but you always had the signal, unless you set your squelch too tight.

Even with FleetSatCom in the Navy, signal degradation and propogation loss was a common bugaboo. It was more than frustrating when we'd be sitting at our good old R-390s chasing russian code and the damned df equipment wouldn't discriminate the signal out of the grass. I could hear the signal just good enough to make copy, but the stupid million dollar hardware couldn't even tell it was there. But that's besides the point, the sat come guys were constantly fussing with their gear trying to maintain a signal lock on a TDM from the Pac Sat and half their traffic would be lost as the ship rolled which usually caused a 30 db signal swing as they lost peak azimuth. You'd never have an issue like that working analog.

I do agree, distinguishing between signal quality and the quality of the programming is important. In my opinion, it doesn't matter what signal format they use these days, the programming stinks, and I'm not even sure free is worth it anymore.

As for audio signal level during commercials, if it is just compression, why is my db meter reading twice the signal level during commercials? Sound power is sound power, and it doesn't matter if you are feeding audio fidelity at 10 Khz if the majority of the audio is voice because the power band for voice is less than 5 Khz, so the only way the voice audio level goes up is if someone is jamming the gain over 0db. However you want to put it on the front end, the result is a matter of fact that audio for commercials on some channels is twice the power level at the tv output as what it is during the program. I would bet good money if I put an O'scope on the audio signal in my tv set that I'd see the peak voltage significantly higher during the commercial than during the show. Also having worked on commercial broadcast equipment, I've seen plenty of examples where the rf signal has been overmodded and in fact has bled into adjacent channel space. How does that happen if the audio input isn't being overdriven?

I guess that's the price we pay for not having to have a television license system, huh? There's no "free" sat tv here in the USA that you can get with less than a swimming-pool size dish, and even at that, it's mostly encrypted mush.

Until I was in other countries, I always thought that the proliferation of sat dish systems was evidence of paying subscribers to TV services similar to our DishNetworks here in North America. I was astonished to find out that it was just a system that's basically a really, really, really tall antenna tower for free broadcasts.

What's more amazing is that in places with the DVT-B standard, I can get a $19 plug-in device for a cheap laptop and get a good signal almost everywhere. I just can't believe how much we've let our broadcast infrastructure become a relic - and how much this DTV thing here in the USA is a boondoggle.

I am unaware of any system that automates the positioning of the antenna based on the currently tuned signal. Are you?

Well you and I both know that overmodding a commercial Xmit site is against FCC rules, esp when you start slamming adjacent channels. But the audio portion of the programming, was, at least in 1993, which was the last time I made a commercial for broadcast, clearly and specifically limited to 0db average, and we had stuff rejected for broadcast for over-modulation.

Now that said, even way back then - and more so now - there are astonishing tricks they can do with sound, especially with various modulation envelopes that mess with the phasing and frequency of the signal in a way that both pushes voice way forward - and as you may have heard in some of those care commercials where they mumble the terms and conditions disclaiming the previous 28 seconds of offers, "smearing" the voice into music via a digital process that "averages" sounds together similar to the way a digital imaging tool can average images.

+100 on that!

Yes, there are a host of techniques for filling the voids in the mod envelope. The bottom line is that the output at the tv end is going to result in a significant average audio power level increase. From some of the readings I've taken, that audio output is pushing 6 db over the program level. It is annoying.

"Were I being affected right now economically, the dish would be the first thing in the junk pile for sure. "

When I lost my fairly decent job, sat TV was the first thing to go. It just wasn't worth it.

The next thing I canceled was my garbage.

Wait, I'm repeating myself...

Sue

Martin,

TV is one of those things many people get very passionate over. For me personally, I pretty much stopped watching television several years ago and now average perhaps 4 hours a month (except soccer games!). But for many people, it's a daily thing so it is important.

That being said, you and I both know that with any kind of RF broadcasting there are lots and lots of variables. Digital's "cliff effect" nature is just one of them. As you know, many stations also moved towers, some operate and different power now. Some are higher then they were and need "tilt" now. And the list goes on and on and on.

The other big hidden issue is that of the low percentage of households that rely on OTA coverage, a large percentage of those (especially in the eastern corridor) rely on indoor atennaes. That will likely have to change.

Here is a link that maps the coverage before and after for Philidelphia.

http://www.fcc.gov/dtv/markets/maps_report1/Philadelphia_PA.pdf

As you will see, some specific areas do lose coverage on some channels. They also gain coverage they didn't have before. And overall more people gain than lose on more stations. Every market will be different, but this kind of change is typical from everything I've studied (was my job for a while).

Change is the operative word. It's never easy and yes there will be winners and losers. But overall this change is a positive one; and one I think history will judge as neccessary.

Hope this helps,

I've been really disapointed in tv lately, there just isn't anything on worth watching but the bundle package with digital cable is cheaper that having phone and internet seperate.

Yeah, we ditched the TV in July 1999, so I'm with you there. I really just was hoping for something reliable for emergencies. The junkiest portable from a thrift shop could reliably get UHF 69 and 39 in this area with nothing more than a hunk of wire hanging off the terminals, I just can't believe how truly bad the digital coverage is by comparison.
this weekend, we're going to try ONE MORE TIME to get the antenna up. I have a tulip poplar that's REALLY tall, it towers above all the other trees. My neighbor is one of those insane tree-climber guys you hire for the scary tree-take downs. He's going to haul the antenna, pre-rigged to a 10' length of 2" Aluminum Pipe, to the top of one of the trees and anchor it up there. My rough estimates will have the mid-section of the antenna at about 90' AGL. I am still using Coax as feedline, even though I think twin-lead would do better, and I debated an antenna-mounted amp, but I've had too many of those fail. It's going to be about 140' of feedline until it gets to the house, at which point it will enter an amp and from there, it's going to a Pinnacle HD USB stick connected to a Mac Mini running Boxee and feeding a 22" LCD display. I haven't found anything but a patent to connect the rotor to the tuner for automated positioning, there's plenty of extra boxes out there, none of which I want to get.

The whole point may be moot. DTV may be a case of to little, too late, because I fired up my Verizon 3g wireless modem, and it streamed Hulu just fine, and from what I can tell, WiMax and other Over The Air Two-Way Broadband (OTA-BB) schemes are literally coming soon, and then it won't really matter what the broadcasters are doing, as we'll simply connect - similar to Wifi - the the WWAN in the area (and we have SOLID coverage from AT&T and Sprint, even out here in the woods) - and that's that.

On a positive note, all of this hoo-ha about DTV has revived my interest in Ham Radio, something I abandoned about 7 years ago. I still have some gear in a box in the basement and I think I might putter a bit with a Winlink and a packet relay sort of thing.

Every 6 months or so, I turn the tv on, view the garbage for 10 minutes, then shut it off. It never gets better. My wife likes the soaps during the day. She works from home a lot, and they make good background noise.

I honestly don't care. I only use it for watching dvd's like OBG. I believe you Martin, I'm just finding better things to do with my time, Ham has always been on my list. I might have to look into that also.

There are supposed to be high-end sets that will do that automatically but most rotators are manual, like mine, or semi-automatic. Semi-automatic units will allow you to associate a channel number with a compass azimuth and they can save a step or two.

Almost all the channels I get are available reliably on one azimuth. But there is one channel I seldom watch that sometimes, when the weather doesn't cooperate, requires that I mess with the rotator and watch the signal strength available through the 'display mode' of the digital converter.

Sturgeon's Law applies. A random sampling is unlikely to hit the good stuff. Here in the UK I can find an hour a day easily, out of 24 hours times however many channels I get now. It helps to have a PVR that can seek out and record programmes regardless of when or where they are broadcast. I rarely watch anything live, or found by just switching on the TV. My viewing is planned.