The real crunch will occur on Feb 17, 2009, or whatever date "certain" eventually shakes out. There are many stations, ours included, that were assigned a permanent DTV channel that is neither our analog or our temporary DTV channel.
Overnight, we are expected to turn off our analog, turn off our Digital, retune our digital for another channel, retune our mask filter for that channel, and expect it all to work again when we fire up 6 hours later.
We cannot light up our permanent DTV early due to interference to other users on that frequency that won't clear the spectrum until the turnoff date. We cannot afford to purchase yet a third transmission plant. We may have to purchase a low power solid state transmitter to use with a standby antenna for temporary use while we do all the retuning and testing of the full power facilities on the new frequency.
I think the date certain transition would occur faster both here, and in the UK, if digital facilities were given priority over analog facilities in terms of interference. i.e. you could continue to operate, and viewers could continue to choose to receive, analog, but would have to accept any interference generated by digital operations. The reduced quality of the analog signal would give viewers a tangible incentive to switch to digital, and the full power digital services on their final channel assignments would give them something to tune to.
For those few stations that have chosen to return to their analog channel for their final digital home will have to make a choice of turning off analog or making a flash cut at the end of the transition.
John----- Original Message ----- From: "John Willkie" <johnwillkie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
There have been about 10 years to install the gear. The real crunch was with the first phase. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org
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