[opendtv] Re: News: Those licenses will soon be worthless...
- From: Mark Schubin <tvmark@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 17:46:54 -0400
>Why don't you ask Mark Schubin, who has seen first hand the 1999 Baltimore
>Sinclair demonstrations, the 2000 Sinclair/DVB HM COFDM demonstrations, and
>all of the latest and greatest 8-VSB receivers paraded through his
>apartment.
>
>
>
As my name has been bandied about a great deal in this thread, I thought
I'd offer a recap:
1. To the best of my knowledge, no one has tested COFDM in my
apartment, so no one knows whether it works here.
2. During the Sinclair tests, I went to a preselected apartment. It
was preselected because it's not easy to drag a pile of equipment from
door to door asking if you can come in for a few hours to do some
testing. If I recall correctly, the apartment was on the 9th floor in
the Inner Harbor area of Baltimore without line of sight to the
transmitter. NTSC reception was so-so (worse than in my apartment).
ATSC reception with the receivers used at the time was virtually
impossible. I was unable to get any reception no matter what I did.
The Sinclair people, who had been to the apartment previously, had found
one location where, jamming the Radio Shack dual-bow-tie with reflector
between a window and an architectural element, they could get reception,
and they showed it to me. With the DVB-T receivers, however, it was
virtually impossible NOT to get reception. Every antenna position and
orientation I tried had stable reception. No antenna at all still had
reliable reception if I simply touched the antenna lead. This was with
the same channel, transmitting antenna, tower, and power amplifier used
for the ATSC a few minutes earlier. Only the exciter was changed at the
transmitter.
3. One of the same model ATSC receivers tried in Baltimore was tried in
my apartment. It never provided stable reception, but it did offer
flashes of pictures and sounds for a few seconds with some antennas,
positions, and orientations, which is more than we got in Baltimore
(except in the one widow-jammed location).
4. The 5th-generation LG receiver tested in my apartment worked fine.
I would call it plug-&-play. But the DVB-T receiver tested in Baltimore
six years earlier outperformed it in the Baltimore apartment. Touching
the antenna lead of the LG was not sufficient for reception in my apartment.
5. My apartment is not the Baltimore apartment. The equipment tested
in Baltimore is not the equipment tested here. The transmissions in
Baltimore are not the transmissions here. But, if I had to try an
educated guess based on my experience in Baltimore and here, I'd suspect
that DVB-T would work here.
I hope this helps clarify matters.
TTFN,
Mark
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