[TowerTalk] HD Over-the-air TV

[Jim Lux]

At 10:14 AM 3/7/2006, A.J. Farmer (AJ3U) wrote:
>On 3/7/06, Lee Buller <k0wa at 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.