Craig Birkmaier wrote: > Who says we need WIDE AREA TV broadcast? What > we need is more granularity so that we can > better meet the demands of communities and > even neighborhoods. the large markets of the > N.E. corridor are made up of hundreds of > communities in each market. Cable systems are > gearing up to serve individual neighborhoods. Geez, Craig, your arguments are from all points of the compass rose, more so than TV transmitter sites. First of all, if you want to devolve broadcast TV into a low-rent ad machine for neighborhood take-out pizza joints, you cannot do that with "most markets can be covered with 4-5 transmitters on existing buildings and towers." Those "4-5 transmitters" in SFN cannot create a hyperlocal broadcast system. Instead, ideally, the 4-5 tower SFN will emulate a big stick, hopefully providing more even power density in a small center city area. Oh yeah, like Berlin or Paris. And the same protection rules will apply as you need with big sticks. And the suburbs will be covered with a signal that's likely worse than what the big stick would have provided (depending on tower height and transmitter power). Secondly, if you claim that an OTA broadcaster can't afford one or two low-budget multicast streams, such as cable systems have, then good luck with this hyperlocal nightmare. You think ads from your neighborhood will support OTA broadcasting worth watching? Thirdly, there are communities between Balt and Wash, such as Laurel and Columbia MD for example, which must be served by both Wash and Balt stations. Because the residents in fact go to both markets daily, for work and for entertainment. > I was not waving my arms. I was telling you > about real world tests conducted by engineers > working for a major network in New York City. > This is not religion Bert, it it fact. All I can do is repeat what I said before. If you think otherwise, I can only conclude two possible scenarios. (1) The engineers told you something that you partially misunderstood, and filled in the rest with wishful thinking, or (2) You were speaking to business managers and not engineers. The Euro SFNs are actual, working systems. The engineers that developed them are not total incompetents. The rules governing how these systems work are well enough understood, and they are documented, and I quoted the documents to you on more than one occasion. > Broadcasters took the easy way out, depending > on the generosity of regulators who gave them > the spectrum and protected their largess. See, I don't believe you. If you go in misunderstanding the issues, of course you can come to all sorts of negative conclusions. Change your going in assumptions to something closer to the truth, and most of your objections will vanish. It's very simple. Bert _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469230/direct/01/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.