[opendtv] Re: Zenith box at Radio Shack

At 11:08 AM -0500 2/27/08, John Shutt wrote:
The NTIA has said that they will not send out coupons to a zip code until STBs are generally available in that area. I suppose that is part of being a 'certified' retailer, you report your inventory to the NTIA.
I simply cannot believe the NTIA's justification for not mandating either a bypass switch or an integrated NTSC tuner in these boxes. The NTIA claims that doing so would lower sensitivity of the receiver by 3 dB and raise costs of the CECBs, but an RF bypass switch would not lower receiver sensitivity (only an RF splitter would,) and VCRs have had them built in for decades so I doubt that it would increase costs by very much.
That is a stupid government committee decision. However, non-governmental committees also make stupid decisions, such as the ATSC's original decision not to make multiple audio stream decoding/mixing a mandatory feature, thereby effectively killing the idea of sending a M/E and separate language Dialog channels, or voiceover audio, or EAS audio. As the ATSC rules now state, a receiver must switch to an audio stream when it is flagged as an E stream type, but it also states elsewhere that the CM stream must also include any emergency audio information. Huh?
And what about the prohibition of including any tuner other than an ATSC tuner. The FCC told the CE industry that they MUST include an ATSC tuner if they include any tuner in a TV - i.e. it is NOT a monitor. As a result the industry developed tuner chips that handle NTSC, ATSC and QAM, and are producing them by the millions. Because of the NTIA tuner restrictions, DTV convertor box manufacturers were face with two possibilities:
1. Use the mass produced chips that are in almost every new TV and disable the other tuners;
2. Develop chips specifically for these boxes that must include the costs for NRE and up front fab costs. This quite possibly makes these dedicated chips cost as much or more than the more capable chips that are mass produced. 

Both types of products have been approved by the NTIA.
As long as we are discussing this, it might be interesting to speculate if the new dedicated chips are designed to tighter performance specs than those used in TVs?
It would indeed be ironic if the DTV convertor boxes perform better than integrated TVs. Then again, the odds that a new TV will be connected to an antenna are slim, while the DTV convertor boxes are only useful when connected to an antenna... 

Regards
Craig


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