Thread: Obama declares America not ready for change...
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cvmiller is offline cvmiller
2009-01-28 , 01:39
Posts: 191 | Thanked: 29 times | Joined on Sep 2007 @ Ottawa
#27
Originally Posted by Lord Raiden View Post
move to digital does free up a LOT of public airspace on the radio waves. Especially since you can like 10 times the channels via digital in half the space you did with analog. You can stack channels, individual stations can have up to like 9 channels all on the same frequency instead of just one like before.
Not quite right, since ASTC (read: digital broadcast) supports a maximum of only 6 standard definition channels, and no HDTV, or some mix of HDTV and SDTV channels not to exceed 19Mbit data rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_Standards
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTV_tra..._United_States

Actually, digital doesn't free up any spectrum, since DTV still consumes the same 6Mhz of bandwidth that the old analog transmissions did. What frees up spectrum is turning off the analog channels (since broadcasters have been broadcasting on a digital channel and analog channel for the past few years in many markets (read: cities). And of course whacking off channels 52 thru 69 (read: the 700 Mhz band) will free up even more spectrum. I am old, and remember when the UHF band went up to channel 83! Over the years, at the behest of commercial interests, the FCC has given away those channels (to things like 800 Mhz cell phones).

DTV looks great if you can get it. But my experience, is that it just doesn't have the range (read: distance) that analog TV does, which is a problem if you don't live near a big city

Craig...
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