Television Digital Cutover & Communications

Just FYI -
If your kits include a television or a radio that can receive television audio, remember that this coming February, they will no longer be able to receive over-the-air signals.

Portable options are few and far between for ATSC devices, and in my tests, the ATSC signal is far more fragile than the old analog signal it is replacing.

In a second line of thinking, I've been using the Verizon National BroadbandConnect service and am very, very happy with it. It's a wireless card that gets you on the internet at about the same speed as a DSL line, with no cables needed. Of course, the cell network will need to be present for it to work, and I've not tested it in an emergency situation when the cell sites are saturates, but as a way of getting online when the power is out and the wires are down it works.

Finally, in terms of telecommunications, it's a good idea to have a calling card in your wallet for those times the cell network is down. AT&T cards have no expiration and really low fees.

I recently picked up the Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro Stick. It is powered by a USB port on my laptop, and displays NTSC (soon to go away), ATSC (the new digital standard), HDTV, and also receives FM radio. I added a set of inexpensive headphones, because laptop speakers have poor audio. Using the supplied antenna (a telescoping whip with a magnetic base) I was unable to get a good analog signal, but receive over 40 digital or HDTV signals. My normal plan is to connect it to the external antenna on my motor home so that I can watch TV while "on the road". It can also connect to Cable TV, and watch any station that does not require a converter box. I was quite surprised by the excellent digital and HDTV performance, especially with the substandard antenna. My plan for power and/or Cable TV outage is to use this device with my laptop to gather information from TV news, as appropriate. The laptop batteries will last for some time, and very little backup power is required to recharge the laptop batteries when they run low.

More info is on their web site: www.pinnaclesys.com. Standard disclaimers apply.

I have been holding off on buying a 12-volt TV / DVD player to let the market catch up with the change over. I don’t really need one, but want it mostly to watch DVDs, but if If I’m going to buy one why not get it with a TV? I’m thinking this coming Christmas season would be a good time to buy a 12-volt portable TV / DVD player. I would guess the stores will be saturated with TVs right about then.

"...the ATSC signal is far more fragile than the old analog signal it is replacing..."

The TV in the living room of our new home on wheels is digital. When we get to a new "home," I crank up the antenna, then have the TV search for available channels. Many of the stations picked up broadcast both analog and digital. The digital is a superior view, but it comes and goes often, while the analog just keeps on a tickin'. I worry about what is gonna happen come Feb.

Great news on the aircard. Our Verizon aircard is well over a year old, and runs at the speed of lazy dialup. We may have to visit Verizon for a new card...

My 12-volt analog-only TV in the motor home died recently, and I could not find anything on the market that would make a decent replacement, so I opted for the laptop option. I usually take a couple of DVD's with me on road trips and watch them on the laptop anyway, so the new TV option works well for my application.

I agree with your statement that the industry has some catching up to do, especially in the 12-volt TV/DVD world. It does seem logical that November/December would be a good time to have such items in the stores....

Many stations are currently broadcasting analog at full strength on their original VHF frequencies, and digital on temporary UHF frequencies at significantly reduced power. Come cutover time, the digital may be switched over to the VHF frequency that is freed up when the analog currently there goes away. Or the digital on that temp UHF frequency may go higher power and be made permanent.

All this channel switching is made transparent to the end user by something called PSIP ("Program and System Information Protocol"). That's a way that frequencies can be mapped into channel numbers. For example, analog channel 9 is broadcast on the 187.25MHz frequency. "Digital channel 9" is often referred to as "channel 9.1", but this designation does not imply any particular broadcast frequency. It could be, for example, UHF channel 42 (639.25MHz) that is "mapped" to channel 9.1 via PSIP. What your digital tv does when it scans for channels (or you tune one manually) is it reads the PSIP data that is broadcast on that frequency. That PSIP data in effect says something like "I know you found me on channel 42, but instead of calling me 42, call me 9". Your TV remembers this.

That's probably lots more than you ever wanted to know. Bottom line: What you see today in terms of "fragile signal" is not necessarily what you'll see come switchover time. Actually, the digital signal is much more robust than the analog signal. The "fragility" that has been mentioned does not have to do with digital vs. analog (analog is the more fragile). It has to do with low power temporary transmitters and antennas. Or it could have to do with you having your over-the-air antenna pointed in the wrong direction. The digital transmission may well be broadcast from a different compass direction than the analog. If your antenna is pointed in the wrong direction for what you are trying to receive, you may still be able to pick up something if you're lucky (off axis), but you may also experience "fragility" because you're pointed incorrectly.

Thanks for all that info, and I hope that you are correct. Guess we will find out come Feb.

Re our antenna being off a tad, that is very probable. We use the time tested method of me turning the antenna from the bedroom, with my wife watching TV in the living room. When she gets the "best" picture she yells "stop" and I do...

I disagree - strongly.

From July 1999 until late last year, I had no television at all. I decided to get an HDTV tuner card for a PC because we intended to watch the olympics over the air this summer. Along the way, I picked up a 13" color TV set for free at the end of a rummage sale.

So, I have an old Analog set and a modern DTV card for a PC. I wanted to test them both. I also got a DTV convertor box for the old 13" TV. I got a monster TV antenna, put it on a mast up way-high in the top of a huge tree (what an ordeal THAT was), so it's at about 60' AGL. I ran Quad Shield RG8 down. It's on a rotator and I got the coordinates of the transmitters down in Philly and over in NYC, as well as Allentown. I have an aim point for each station.

After all was said and done, the DTV was hardly worth the effort. I spent HOURS messing with the system, trying to get something like stable reception on the DTV signal.

I have found that there really is no "fringe" reception at all. With the NTSC setup, I could get and live with a snowy, ghosty analog image and still get something understandable out of it.

With digital, the signal level fluctuates for who knows why, a signal that was fine one day is on the next day stutter-bursts of image & sound, making it gibberish, or nothing at all. That's really frustrating - when a DTV channel that was showing a 48% signal on Tuesday simply vanishes on Wednesday.

With the old analog rig, I could point the antenna in the general direction of a major city and be sure to get signals on a number of channels. With digital, not only do I need a higher antenna, I need to aim it far more specifically, and even then, I found it to be unreliable.

I gave up and took the antenna down a few weeks ago, tossed the TV into the household hazmat pickup bin and I use the Tuner card as an input source for the camera in the henhouse, so I can keep an eye on the peeps we hatch out.

I'll get my Olympics online, I guess.

NTSC was flawed, indeed, but the market didn't cry out for something better, this change was forced. I don't think most people care for how the signal looks. Look at the dismal sales of Blu-Ray vs. upconverted standard DVD - look at all the wide-screens you see making 4:3 NTSC fill a 16:9 screen - nobody cares.

Anyway, there's no choice now, you gotta buy the DTV stuff and hope for the best. Did I mention ATSC does not work when mobile? Yeah, that's not in the spec.

I think you are running into either:

(1) Your digital stations are broadcasting at low power, not full power (many are doing this now - call the station and ask them, they'll tell you).

(2) You have the wrong type of antenna (A VHF model when you may need a UHF one). You may also need an amplifier today if your stations are broadcasting at low power.

(3) Your digital tuners - both in the the PC card and the digital converter box - are not very good. Many of the digital converter boxes are indeed junk. Rushed to market at cheap prices. You might look at the "DTVPal" made by Echostar/DishNework. It is brand new and getting very good reviews.


This is true. You are evidently running into what is commonly called "the digital cliff". Either you have a great picture, or you don't have any picture. There is a very small window right near that cutoff where you will see pixelation, noise, and things cutting in and out. If your stations are broadcasting their digital signals at low power, the cliff may be closer to you than you'd like. But this will probably change at the analog-digital changeover date. Many stations are using temporary digital transmitters and small antennas today, and are ramping up their higher power transmitters and better antennas for the changeover date.


It's not the signal that disappeared (except if the transmitter broke - unlikely). It's your tuners ability to lock onto the signal. A very small deviation in the signal may throw your tuner over the cliff where it can't lock the signal.


Are you using a VHF antenna trying to pick up digital channels that are temporarily being broadcast on UHF? (and mapped down to lower channel numbers that appear to be VHF via PSIP). You have to have the correct type of antenna, and an antenna with enough gain to pick up the signal (which, as I've said before, is probably being broadcast at very low power temporarily).


You are confusing HDTV (high definition TV) and DTV (digital TV). These are two separate things. There is no mandate for stations to go HD, only for them to go digital. There is still tons and tons of standard definition programming being broadcast digitally. This will continue after the analog cutoff date.

If your comment on "most people don't care for how the signal looks" is supposed to go along with your second comment about stretching a 4:3 aspect ratio to a 16:9 one (I can't tell from your working), for the most part this distortion is caused by people who are ignorant of how to work their TVs. But not always. There are some TV stations that are notorious for actually broadcasting stuff in "stretch-o-vision". They do this because to many ignorant people, "short, fat characters" on the screen equal high definition. Not at all. It only means "distorted aspect ratio". I certainly don't set my TV to intentionally distort the picture, and if I run across a show that is actually being broadcast in stretch-o-vision, I move on to a different channel.


This has to do with the need for the receiver to sample the digital signal at specific intervals. If the receiver is moving quickly, this is difficult. Think of a car honking the horn while it first drives towards you, then past you - the frequency that the horn is broadcasting does not change, but it appears to get lower in frequency to your ear as you are passed because of the Doppler Effect. New broadcast specs, which are backwards compatible with existing tuners, are starting to overcome this limitation.

I'd just like to add that the FCC's reason for the switchover is not to provide a better picture, but to free up bandwidth. Digital broadcasts use up a lot less of the spectrum than analog.

I have (had) a massive, just massive UHF/VHF antenna, it was a zillion elements and about a football field long. The UHF section was a huge corner reflector thing hanging way off the front. I know the difference between UHF and VHF, I have a ham radio license, I'm familiar with the basic concepts of antenna construction, I've built a few myself.


I'm not looking at anything anymore. When a free television virtually pulled from the trash works better than the whizzy new tech that's supposed to replace it - well, I'm reticent to invest anything it it.


I miss analog hills.


Ummm....and this is different (in terms of my experience) how?



No, I'm not. I know that the DTV system (ATSC) can carry HD but does not have to. My point is that I can't recall ever being at a party where people were griping about the picture quality on their TV. I, like many other folks, didn't really have a problem with the NTSC system, it was, like AM radio, "good enough" for the job and a technology that was mature, cheap and effective.



My point exactly. Most people don't see the difference. If you can't tall fat-o-vision from HD, that means there's really no point (for most folks) to having HD at all.
To be honest, until recently, I didn't really see a major difference for HD vs. SD, in terms of picture quality. The gamma still is horrid, the compression artifacts are really annoying. I have been checking out uncompressed 1080i via digital downloads, and it's really not all that wonderful (at least to me). Certainly it's not going to be enough for me to go out and buy any new gear, ever.



Yeah, I know all about doppler shifts - I compensated for them when I used to work AO-SAT for field day and such when I was more active in Ham Radio. It's amazing to me that the slight movement of a car, relatively speaking, can kill an ATSC signal, whereas I can stream video with no problem via my Verizon mobile card.

I've hammered on this one long enough. I think this is a poor technology, one that is unnecessarily complex and expensive, and is solving a problem nobody has. It was imposed by fiat by a government that was supposed to re-allocate spectrum to the public good. The "D" block is a fiasco, the balance of the 700 Mhz auction was hardly a huge success, and here we are, a few months away, and the last thing I'll ever watch OTA is going to be the Olympics via an ancient - but working - Analog NTSC tower in Philadelphia.

Hi martinfocazio

Have you tried a HDTV E-PHEMT mast LNA such as the one you can find here at http://www.researchcomms.com/hdtv.html, which can give around 20dB Gain and only 0.4 dB Noise figure. That should help considerably with your UHF signal problems.

Sounds like you know about antennas and radio. You didn't say that before. I was just trying to help, that's all. Most folks these days have never even seen a TV antenna up close, let alone know VHF vs. UHF or how to aim one. Cable and satellite are the norm now (in urban and suburban settings at least).

I do disagree with you about digital vs. analog one being superior to the other. But that's OK. We can agree to disagree. It surely depends on our circumstances. Digital reception just trounces analog reception in my area. Even with low power transmitters for the digital and high power transmitters for the analog. I do agree that good upconverted DVDs are fine. Yes, I can clearly tell the difference between BR (or HDDVD) and upconverted DVD, but it really doesn't change the movie watching experience. It's most impressive for those who like to closely observe the nose hairs in the actors though. But anyone who puts up with stretch-o-vision broadcast or adjusts the aspect ratio to "fill their screen" by distorting things is pretty ignorant IMHO.

SD broadcast TV viewed on my 65" HDTV looks pretty lousy (partly because of the horrible compression that Dish adds). That is typical for HDTVs, but some are better than others at displaying marginal SD programming. However, if I use my OTA antenna, ATSC still beats NTSC by a good margin, and HD really shines. Your areas is just different I guess.

The problem with Digital (and having chatted with Marty more than once I know some of his experiences) - picture you are "deep fringe" - with analog (and in this case AM is even better than FM) you might get a static filled signal - in TV, we'll call it "seeing raster", but the human mind can pull signal from the noise. In digital, you drop ONE bit, you have no reception. It's wonderful when it works, and you can get every bit in each digital packet - but with analog, if you lose the same amount of data, you don't lose signal, you just get a noisy signal

And this is the main flaw in the whole DTV scheme - it's not fault-tolerant like TCP/IP.

This is the main issue with DTV - there's no good way to deal with packet loss in the same way you do with TCP/IP, which can not only re-send lost packets, it can send packets via multiple paths and even network connections and you can put them all in order and store up enough for a decent stream as they pass through the local buffer. I've read up on the ATSC standard (and QAM and all the rest of the jargon associated with DTV) and I am astonished that a specification as poorly engineered as this ever was adopted as a standard. From a data-delivery standpoint, and in looking at real-world situations like multi-path reflections and intermittent signal reduction due to leaf coverage, weather patterns and so forth, it's no wonder I'm at - and off - the edge of the "digital cliff".
This is now the second time I've seen how a digital "upgrade" from analog is in fact a downgrade for end users. Many of the same issues I face as a firefighter with our APCO-25 Digital Radios are similar to the ATSC issues (random, unexplained outages, does not work where the old analog system did). At least in the fire service, we've been given the ability (in fact a MANDATE) to NOT use the digital system for Fireground Communications (it's deemed to unreliable for on-scene life safety). With television broadcasts, I won't have that option.

I wonder what hurricane season 2009 will be like when the cable TV wires go down and people try to get local information on TV and they find that the old TV in the garage that worked last year does not work anymore.

My bet: You'll see a hasty "temporary reactivation" of the NTSC Analog facilities before 2009 is out.

"...In digital, you drop ONE bit, you have no reception..."

Yeah, you get a black screen, with the little words "No Signal" up in the corner. And in our limited experience, it comes and goes with a very irritating frequency. Hopefully when they go all digital it will get better. If not, we will be hitting the $5 DVD bucket at WallyWorld a lot more...

A lot of times the data cards run ona separate "channel" so voice calls don't saturate the data calls and vice versa.

Its not that bad, all your broadcast digital video like this uses a lossy compression so your loosing a few bits there and there anyway. When you do drop some bits is when you see the blocky look on the screen as whole packets get dropped then you start to drop too many and the display get blanked.

Its the same as the little satalite dishes when they get covered with snow, your signal startes to get blocky then goes away.
The real annoying thing is when your aying for cable tv and it gets blocky so you can tell they are just forwarding a signal from a little dish, might as well just get the dish.

I'm undecided as to whether I even need to continue getting TV signals. The effort it takes to uncover anything worthwhile in the midst of the crap is tiring.

I'm not trying to hijack this thread at all, and this question may have already been answered here, but I have lost track with all the high tech acronyms, etc, so here goes. Is there something, maybe like an aircard, that you can stick in a laptop and receive TV signals? Digital signals? That would be perfect for us ramblin' folks who don't want to mess with a sat dish...

You might consider using a laptop with a wireless broadband internet connection. It's as if your computer connect through a cell phone connection, in simplified terms. I don't think you are going to get much live programming, though. You could download video, and most shows on TV are available soon after airing.

The one sitcom I watch is The Office, and I've saw more episodes this past season on a laptop than on a TV screen. I did need to wait a day to see them.

I will say that while the wireless broadband is nice, it's simply not as good as using the wires that come into our apt.

We receive our internet thru an aircard now, no live TV there, I was just hoping that their might be another gizmo that would allow the laptop to receive TV signals. Probably too much to hope for...

That's interesting. I've got a router that accepts a PCMCIA broadband card, and it acts as both a WiFi base station and DHCP server and a 5-port switch. We use one at work when we're at a trade event and we want internet connectivity, I have one at home that I've been messing with as connection option, and I've used it for Gizmo5 calling to regular phones with great success.

Plenty of devices out there that will let you do Over the Air TV to your computer. They connect to your USB port. You need hefty computer processing power, though.

"...Plenty of devices out there that will let you do Over the Air TV to your computer..."

What would such a gizmo be called so I can google one?

"...You need hefty computer processing power..."

How hefty???

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=47&name=TV-Tuners-Video-Devices

Hi OldBaldguy,



The computing power required to decode the DTV requires a Pentium or Athlon processor running at roughly the following speeds,

600-800 MHz for viewing DTV
800-1 Ghz for viewing and recording DTV (turns your PC into a powerful digital video recording machine)
2.4+ GHz (Pentium) 1.8+ GHz (AMD Athlon) for viewing HDTV

These computer speeds are for European DVB-T with an internal PCI card (fitted inside a desktop computer) but the US DTV standard will be somewhat similar. A slightly faster PC would probably be required for USB connection. USB 2.0 standard ports should be used as they are much faster than the older USB 1.1 specifications.

Any of the new Dual/Multicore processors (AMD or Intel) should have no problem with these DTV decoders. (either PCI or USB2.0)

There are now quite a few graphics cards designed to do the most of the brute force decoding of the DTV signal and put the video out on a HDMI connector for the large panel HDTV LCD televisions.

I personally have a Nebula Electronics DVB-T HDTV PCI card in the back of a declocked 1.8GHz Athlon XP running at 1.24GHz with 1 Gig of memory and it works flawlessly.

http://www.nebula-electronics.com/shots.asp shows some DVB-T screenshots

The Nebula Electronics DVB-T adapter will also allow the PC to become a network Video server allowing the video stream to be re-broadcast over a home network wirelessly and over the Internet (the ability to login into my DVB-T video server from any other PC in the world with an internet connection to setup recording and view British TV from anywhere in the world)

(I'm looking to soon upgrade the motherboard and processor to an Athlon X2 EE 4400 processor and Gigabyte AM2+ motherboard to reduce power consumption to around 30-40 Watts after declocking)

Typically channels such as BBC1 (one of about 50 free to air TV and 20 Radio channels) are transmitted as 15Mbps Video and 256kbps Audio so the video bandwidth is actually greater than DVD standard (with virtually no compression artifacts)and Audio as good as CD.

Then of course there is always BBC iPlayer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/ just in case you have missed the latest episode of Dr Who.

Thanks to both of you. I only understood about one iota of what I read, but it appears that our current laptop doesn't have a prayer of letting us watch TV in real time. Back to the drawing board...