At 10:14 AM 3/7/2006, A.J. Farmer (AJ3U) wrote:
>On 3/7/06, Lee Buller <k0wa@swbell.net> wrote:
> > I know that this might be a little off topic, but I find the whole
> idea of terrestial high >definition digital television facinating from
> the idea of signal to noise, propagation, and >multipathing. Has anyone
> out there have any experience with HD Terrestial TV?
>
>Yes, I'm picking up the stations out of Washington DC here at my
>house. I'm about 60 miles away. I'm using a UHF directional TV
>antenna with a mast mounted pre-amp. Since it is digital, the
>reception is crystal clear. The nice thing about the over the air HD
>channels is that each broadcaster is broadcasting two channels. One
>is the standard programming (NBC, CBS, FOX, whatever) and the second
>channel most of them have dedicated to local weather. The ABC station
>here leaves their second channel on their local doppler radar sweep
>24/7. Whenever I heard the rumble of thunder, I switch to that
>channel and can see the location and movement of the storms in
>realtime.
Since anybody doing Digital ATV would be using a tower for their antenna,
it's sort of tangentially on topic, but what's truly sad is that there is
almost ZERO amateur DTV activity in the U.S. Just try and find a source
for a amateur DTV exciter. What tiny amounts of DTV activity there are use
an obsolete (but cheap) satellite TV receiver using a modulation
incompatible with the format used in the U.S. for terrestrial
broadcasts. So we have the interesting prospect over the next few years of
every TV being sold with a digital receiver, a great potential resource for
amateurs, but useless because there's no amateur 8VSB transmitter hardware
out there.
There WAS a source for DVB-T and DVB-S gear for experimenters and amateurs
in Europe, but last I checked, they had gone away.
Really too bad.. But hey, NTSC analog AM ATV will just be yet another
archaic mode preserved by amateurs as an interesting hobby and curiosity.
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