Ch.7 w/Reduced Power (In DTV Transition?)

[Dan.Strassberg]

Sheesh! I hope not! Antenna problems with over-the-air DTV reception
in a very good location (near the top of a hill just north of Route 2
in Arlington--near the Lexington line) are bad enough with just one
band to deal with. Of course, the most frustrating problems--getting
everything set up and working properly, only to suffer intermittent
audio dropouts and pixellation many minutes later--appear to be
related to leafy trees swaying in the wind. (After much head
scratching and much fruitless moving and rotating of the passive-loop
antenna, I concluded that, indeed, the answer was blowing in the
wind!) A VHF signal might not exhibit those problems--or at least
might mitigate them significantly, but a mixture of VHF and UHF, each
requiring its own antenna, in a world of virtual channels (how many
people even have a clue about the physical channels?) would be a
DISASTER!

The worst problems appear to result from a fundamental flaw in the
design of the DTV signal/system. The first thing to go is the audio.
It clearly should be the last. The video artifacts can be annoying,
but the audio dropouts are fatal to following the thread of the
content. If the audio were listenable, you could live without the
video in most cases; the converse is not true. The geniuses who
designed the system should have given the highest priority to the
robustness of the audio, but they didn't. What were they thinking?
That everyone would have cable service? Not me! And not at least 20%
of the audience around here.

And because the receivers and converter boxes do not contain
provisions for software upgrades, if the ATSC and the FCC ever finally
decide that the system needs to be upgraded, there will be no way to
upgrade existing hardware at reasonable cost! Can't the FCC EVER do
ANYTHING right?

-----
Dan Strassberg (dan.strassberg@att.net)
eFax 1-707-215-6367

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kaimbridge M. GoldChild" <Kaimbridge@gmail.com>
To: "Boston Radio Interest"
<Boston-Radio-Interest@lists.BostonRadio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 10:17 AM
Subject: Ch.7 w/Reduced Power (In DTV Transition?)


> While I think they ('HDH) are at reduced power, are they one of the
> channels that are going to revert their DTV channel to their analog?
>
>      ~Kaimbridge~