My own opinion is that the FCC should carefully question Zenith/LG on what exactly was in the 5th gen "black box", and whether Zenith is willing to share detailed info and duplicate it or whether they indeed committed some sort of fraud there.
IMHO there are an awful lot of people (including the other CE guys) that stand to incur some political embarrassment and possible financial loss based upon various Zenith/LG claims. I consider them liable.
- Tom Dale Kelly wrote:
Frank wrote:I don't know how you can say with certainty that these Performance issues are entirely related to "poor RF front end design.My statement was based upon a tuners "selectivity" performance* in the packed channel environment which will now include new unlicensed signals introduced into the so-called "unused white spaces". In such an environment better receiver front ends are required to deal with the IM and image products produced by "minimal" tuners. Clearly, other A/74 related failings could very well be non-tuner related. * = Good selectivity performance generally requires some combination of multi conversion IF, wide band AGC and tracking filters to achieve desired performance.In any case, the market will continue to decide how much incremental Receiver performance is worth. My guess is that CE products will Continue to include the very best RF front end + base band chips, as long as those also happen to be the cheapest ones -- because of the perceived value of an ATSC receiver to most consumers is pretty close to $0.I see this as a somewhat more complex issue than pure economics and don't believe that the CE industry should receive a free pass. Please bear with me for a short historical review, as I recall it: * The ATSC/8VSB system was developed and proposed by the CE community, who also control the current ATSC standards process and is responsible for the very marginal A/74 RP. * 8VSB was "sold" to broadcasters and adopted by the FCC with certain receiver performance expectations. * The original ATTC (Blue Rack) test receiver incorporated a well-designed double conversion tuner that met those expectations. * During initial testing, the industry was "blind sided" by the poor multi-path performance issue, even though it was predicted by a number of engineers. * The CE industry, having no where to hide and needing to protect it's IP investment and stave off a broadcaster revolt, committed significant resources to resolving the multipath problem. After a number of false starts laced with questionable performance claims and five years time, they were able to demonstrate satisfactory performance using a Zenith 5th gen. "black box" receiver, whose performance was never duplicated in any commercial product (as tested by the FCC and others). IMO, that same CE industry, who developed this system and who now proposes and will benefit from, the new unlicensed services, while likely not guilty of fraud, is, through it's failure to provide receivers capable of functioning in the environment they created, disingenuous and completely untrustworthy. They are, through their manipulations, largely responsible for "the perceived value of an ATSC receiver to most consumers being pretty close to $0", which was a self fulfilling prophesy based upon their actions, or lack thereof. Dale----------------------------------------------------------------------You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org- By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.
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