US Switch To DTV Countdown Begins 293
s31523 writes "In February lawmakers postponed the switch from analog to digital TV. Now, the new June 12th deadline is upon us with no sign of another delay. CNET is reporting that the President himself has stated, '... I want to be clear: there will not be another delay.' So it looks like it is going to happen, for real this time. Even with the delay, there are still estimated to be millions of unprepared viewers. Local stations may participate in the voluntary 'Analog nightlight' services in which TV stations agree to keep an analog signal turned on in addition to their digital signals to provide information about the DTV transition and to notify unprepared TV viewers of emergencies, such as hurricanes."
Analog nightlight? (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought that with the transition, the old analog frequencies were being reclaimed. Some of the ATSC stations will change frequencies and broadcast digital where the analog used to be. So are they delaying the completion of the transition to allow for this nightlight service? When will we have our stations at their final frequencies?
We're Doing this for You ... r Money (Score:5, Interesting)
"We have worked hand in hand with state and local officials, broadcasters and community groups to educate and assist millions of Americans with the transition...I want to be clear: there will not be another delay."
Well, I hope my government is this vocal and helpful in getting everyone coordinated to switch to IPv6 and HTML5. Oh, ha, that's right. If we switch to those, the government doesn't get to auction off IPv4 or HTML4 for twenty billion dollars. So I guess you only get grade A support from the FCC and Department of Commerce only when they profit from it. That's really a shame, I think if the United States informed consumers on more standards and compliance it would benefit the average citizen. Hell, sometimes I wish the Senators & Congressmen themselves sought such information.
Dear Editor: (Score:4, Interesting)
Digital backslide [illinoistimes.com]
A friend who uses an indoor antenna bought a digital TV, and now only has four stations, two in analog, one of which is a Catholic religion station, and two in digital.
I fear this will happen to cable subscribers too after the loss of Channel 8 [see "Channel 8 goes blank for some WSEC viewers," by Amanda Robert, IT, April 23]. I can see channels going digital one by one until there are no analog signals left.
I was using an indoor antenna (before the digital switch). If I remember correctly, I had channels 12, 17, 19, 20, 28, 48 and 55. Now it seems that in the digital age, digital TV users have only two stations.
Welcome back to 1955 St. Louis!
Curious side-effect of the DTV switchover (Score:4, Interesting)
Curiously, an FM radio station I'd like to listen to says they'll be able to throttle up the power once NTSC station WTVR channel 6 in Richmond goes silent.
I don't know what rule is limiting their transmission on 89.5 MHz due to interference with TV channel 6 (82-88 MHz, with the video carrier on 83.25 MHz and the audio carrier on 87.75 MHz).
I suppose it's an IF thing, but I can't figure out how 10.7 MHz or 45 MHz fits in there.
Corruption (Score:1, Interesting)
The article says that Congress has spent $2 billion on transition and "public education" efforts. Yet 2.5 million people were not given $40 vouchers because "money ran dry"? So you spend $2 billion telling people to get a converter, but won't spend another $100 million so that people can actually afford a converter? Brilliant? Oh right, those billions went into some politicians' pockets, not anywhere near the consumers...
Re:just a thought (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's not on the same multiplex, you'd need at least one other tuner in the box (2 if sequential "channel" numbers are all on different multiplexes). Quite often that's the case, though, particularly in boxes which offer picture-in-picture or "record one channel, watch another" type functionality.
Surefire motivation (Score:4, Interesting)
Want to motivate everyone to pick up their converter box? They should have mandated this back when they delayed the switch the first time:
Most of the broadcasters have half hour "How To Switch" public service programs. The FCC should have mandated that, in March, they pre-empt 25% of their analog programming with one of these programs. In April, 50%, in May, 75%, and by June, analog channels were to carry nothing but the DTV PSAs, or emergency broadcasts when necessary, 24 hours a day. Even worse, let the soap opera run for 5 minutes and then break in with "an important announcement concerning your television service". I'll bet that most people will run out and pick up a converter within days of the 50% threshold.
I never did figure out why they simulcast the 'How to switch' PSAs on their digital channels. All they'd need is a reminder to rescan your converter after June 12th. And put that up full time on the UHF channels on June 12th for a week or so.
Your local laundromat and barber shop... (Score:5, Interesting)
I did a load of clothes at the local laundromat last night, and enjoyed a episode of the New Twilight Zone (which I guess is itself pretty old now) as my unmentionables tumbled in the dryer. The TV, perched precariously atop a non-functional pop machine, was older than my kids. The signal was fuzzy, and I believe the "antenna" was a brown extension cord, ends stripped and screwed into the old 300-ohm input. Most of the time the color dropped out, leaving the New Twilight Zone looking oddly like the Old Twilight Zone.
A couple of weeks ago, I watched a static-y news broadcast at the local barber shop. His TV was equipped with a newfangled set of rabbit ears of much more recent vintage, maybe 10 years old or even newer.
Tomorrow, both locations will almost certainly dish up nothing but that "analog nightlight". And even if the owners get a fancy new box -- not likely at the laundromat, and not terribly certain at the barber shop -- it won't help. The metal in the washers and dryers will probably futz up the digital signal beyond repair. At the barber shop, every time he turns on the clippers -- instead of just getting a little fuzzy, the screen will likely go blank.
It should be an interesting day.
Re:seriously... (Score:1, Interesting)
I haven't gotten a DTV tuner yet and I don't think I'm stupid or lazy. There's so little worth watching on TV that I've decided to give up on it all together.
Another switch the US needs to make.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Could we get going on the switch to the metric system now please? It would require about the same amount of effort and consumer education. Yards, acres, miles, feet - come on people, this is not the 1800s.
LA area Analog Termination Event (Score:3, Interesting)
If you are in LA, feel free to drop by Machine Project on Friday June 12th at 10pm for a talk by Jason Torchinsky about mechanical televisions, to be followed by a midnight countdown to the demise of analog TV. In memoriam of the TVs we all have known and loved/hated, we'll be gathering a pyramid of old TVs together for a countdown as they go to static. Please join us, and if you promise to bring it home with you afterwards, bring a TV for the pyramid.
Farewell to Analog TV [machineproject.com] at Machine Project, Echo Park.
Re:Dear Editor: (Score:3, Interesting)
even cable's not safe (Score:3, Interesting)
Within the last few weeks the local Comcast moved 40 of their sub-100 channels to digital-only. Probably more so they can do switched delivery [wikipedia.org] than because of the DTV transition (broadcast channels etc. are still being fed in analog). But it screwed with the recordings on my dual-tuner Tivo for weeks until I manually updated all of them to "box" from "cbl" -- annoyingly, cutting them out from the benefits of dual-tuner in the first place. :P
So long, electromechanical television reception, you go into the pile with analog magnetic video storage and analog plastic audio storage. Analog radio reception, you're not looking too good...
no portable HDTVs! (sort of) (Score:3, Interesting)
I think to date there are no (or very very few) ATSC capable portable tv's... hopefully someone corrects me, but that spells bad news for folks in hurricane prone areas who could lose power for weeks at a time....
JP
Re:no portable HDTVs! (sort of) (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why government should be as local and small as possible, when it attempts to micromanage the lives of 300 million individuals, something is always overlooked.
Re:Analog TV had the best weather/emergency covera (Score:4, Interesting)
Damn. Obviously, different areas of the country are very different! Here in Oklahoma, the NOAA transmitters are in VERY good locations. From my house, I can pick up two or three indoors, on one of my ham radio antennas I can pick up seven or eight from across the state and even into Texas. Just the other day I was in my car listening to the one that is located in the OKC metro area while I was over 100 miles away.
And the updates seem to happen very quickly here. Indeed, I'll hear the NWS discussing something with the spotters over the radio, then within just a few minutes the weather radio goes off with the new updates. If I had any complaints, I wish they would make more fine-grain use of the SAME codes, our storms aren't usually large enough to affect an entire county at once, but even if their alert specifically says "northeast corner of Oklahoma county" I (on the far west side) still get the alert because they only break things down to county level with the codes.
I do agree about using TV during weather events. The one thing I really liked about the switch to DTV was two of the local stations (NBC and ABC) set up a secondary channel that was nothing but weather. They've ruined it a bit already, with advertising and insets and such, but for a while one of them just had a live feed of their radar up with NOAA weather radio audio. I usually just tune to someone who has radar up and turn the audio down, living here all my life I can read the radar about as well as they can for stuff that matters to me, so don't need the chatter.
Re:I have already faced my worst nightmare (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, digital is (well, appears to the user as if it were) all or nothing, for the most part.
But rain fade on satellite is something different... rain simply attenuates RF at higher frequencies, particularly above 10GHz. Lots of things do... 2.4GHz is pretty hard hit by walls, and blocked by a relatively small band of forest. UHF frequencies are largely unaffected by rain. There are other issues in general: much larger fresnel zone radius (which is why rooftop antennas work better than ground-level, all else being equal), more potential interference (highly illegal, but there are many unintentional noise sources), doppler and multipath fading in mobile applications, etc. (those latter being 8VSB-based, not frequency related.. in fact, multipath cancellation is less likely at UHF than higher frequencies).
Of course, "use the internet" presupposes you're wired. If you have access to wired internet, you probably also have cable or FiOS available, which limits weather issues, at least between you and the head-end. Of course, head ends often use satellite downlinks, but they're on C-band satellites, which are more sensitive and lose much less at 3.7â"4.2 GHz downlink than the Ka-Ku band DBS satellites (Dish, DirecTV) at 12.2-12.7 GHz (Ku band) and 26.5-40 GHz (Ka band). Conversely, if you're on satellite TV, there's a good chance you're on satellite for Internet, too. Like me, tragically enough.
Re:Analog nightlight? (Score:3, Interesting)
No change to digital yet here, either. It is 3:05 a.m. on June 12 and I am still watching analog television. I have an old mid-1990's, analog only TV, I am still getting five of the seven stations which I had always been getting.
I also have a AM/FM/Weather band/TV band radio which has analog audio reception of the VHF television band. It's TV band is still working just fine.
Late last year, I used my coupon to get a free converter box. I soon had it hooked it up. But, it found only one digital channel on the air, where I live. That one channel was amazingly sharp and clear. But, the digital converter box lowered the reception quality of the other six analog channels, to where they were almost unusable. So, I disconnected my converter box, and went back to watching analog TV.
This morning, at 2:30 a.m. on June 12, I hooked up the converter box again. The electronically amplified rabbit ears, which I have been using for analog TV, is supposed to be DTV capable. I had my converter box rescan for new channels, but it did not find any new channels. I still only get that one digital channel. My only DTV channel is the FOX network on KSAZ DT 10.1.
I am in a small city, in Northern Arizona, and get all of my television through a privately owned translator (or repeater). The article says that "high-power broadcasters are required to switch to digital, a few low-power analog stations and rural relay stations known as "translators" will still be available in some areas."
KAET is our nearest PBS station. Going to their web page, I find a map which which says "Eight digital broadcasting currently serves the red area on the map below." [azpbs.org] I can see that I am not in the red area of their map.
Since nothing has changed yet, I have disconnected my converter box, again, and have gone back to watching analog TV.