[opendtv] Charles Rhodes on unlicensed devices and white spaces
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 17:20:16 -0400
http://www.tvtechnology.com/pages/s.0072/t.7434.html
Needless to say, he's against them. He favors repacking the DTT spectrum
to accommodate these devices in a band of their own. He also doesn't
have anything good to say about the possibility that these devices can
adequately detect an open channel.
My thought on this was, if a consumer-grade device is good enough to
detect a very weak signal, which has to be well below -85 dBm, why
wouldn't TV tuner manufacturers use such a tuner to improve TV
reception?
One interesting stat he gives is that OTA signal strengths under -68 dBm
(what the FCC calls weak) occur in 84 percent of DTT coverage area.
(Note by area, not population.)
On a more positive note, I'm not sure what the change was, but the local
PBS station, 90 KW WETA-DT, adjacent in frequency to the 2.3 MW WETA-TV,
suddenly gained a whole lot of signal margin in my receiver. No word yet
why from WETA, but I have to conclude that either its previous ERP was
much less than the allowed 90 KW, or that it just now finished
relocating to this tower, which it shares with two other local stations.
I thought they had made the move many months ago, because there had been
a step improvement already in WETA-DT reception, last year. That's when
it went from no reception to the edge of the cliff.
Now reception is reliable and solid. One HD and three SD multicasts.
(This is how Freeview should eventually migrate to HDTV, IMO, rather
than locating HD on separate spectrum.) The two cases of
adjacent-channel reception problems I was experiencing, inability to
receive 27 and 35, have been resolved for me now, without a change at my
end. Including analog-digital adjacencies. Here are all the adjacent
channel situations, excluding LPTV stations:
14 15 (analog digital)
26 27 (analog digital)
34 35 36 (all digital)
45 46 (analog digital)
50 51 52 (analog digital digital)
One can only wonder how much of the bad publicity 8-VSB got was
attributable to temporary and sub-optimized installations.
Just one example. Digital NBC 11 from Baltimore has always been at the
digital cliff for me. Could this be because they are on Ch 59, soon to
be relocated to Ch 11, so there's no incentive to optimize their current
status?
Bert
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