The "new" TV channels

[k4kyv]

Just as the FCC would find life easier if amateur radio would just go away, the FCC and the TV industry would find life easier if free over-the-air TV would just go away.

[KA1ZGC]

...i cant verify this, but, i've herd that when the change over is complete here in canada, the FM  broadcast band is gonna be extended below 88mhz...likely to 76mhz...

They were hoping the same thing down here, but it didn't happen. Too many TV stations petitioned for their old frequencies and got them back, because the spectrum auction held for the "vacated" VHF TV freqs was a flop.

A ton of new FM licenses were filed for under the assumption that the regulatory protections for channel 6 would go away and open the door for new FMs where they previously couldn't go without tons of compliance headaches. Those protections are still in place, so those applications are essentially dead in the water.

Given the whole 100 km border zone thingy, it probably won't be an all-encompassing change if it happens at all, much in the same sense that American hams can't use the bottom 10 MHz of the American 440 band within 100 km of the Canadian border to avoid interference to your allocations in that chunk of spectrum.

That's not to say it won't happen, just that we had our hopes up down here for a while before it became obvious that some of those "changes" just weren't in the cards.

FWIW, I'm pretty sure it won't handle it in Windows Media Center.   If you try to add another channel 6.1, it will tell you it already exists.  That said, the Media Center app is a POS with all kinds of bugs M$ has failed to address for years.

Precisely. Screw windows media center. You're talking about a company that couldn't even devise a file system that didn't spell their name MICROS~1 until just over a decade ago, when all the real operating systems had tackled that decades before. If there's an app for windows that can handle an ATSC stream properly, it's very unlikely it will come out of Redmond. MICROS~1 themselves have been reduced to animated puppies and dancing paperclips. The real talent left and/or died 15 years ago.

Just as the FCC would find life easier if amateur radio would just go away, the FCC and the TV industry would find life easier if free over-the-air TV would just go away.

Sorry, Don... but you honestly lost me there. What was that in response to?

[W2VW]

Analog TV lives on in a lot of places due to must carry rules.

[W2VW]

If it were standardised nationwide, there would be no problem.  But if channel 2 in Nashville is on a different frequency, or a different (VHF/UHF) band, from channel 2 in Chicago, that's where it becomes a PITA and confusing, particularly for the not-a-clue-technically public.

You're giving that clueless public more credit than they've earned. As a general rule, people are stupid. Most don't have anywhere near as much of a clue about how television works as your example suggests.

In fact, it only becomes confusing when you have some concept of a channel being attached to a specific frequency. Try telling people that television travels over radio waves, they'll look at you like you have two heads. They'll insist that you're wrong, because radio and television are two different things. To most people it's a box full of black magic; and the less they understand, the more comfortable they feel.

Having channel x be on a different frequency than it was doesn't confuse idiots any more than HBO being on different channels in different cities. The notion of channels was broken for most people a long time ago.

The mass-consuming public are to be presumed stupid until proven otherwise.

Let's say I have a really good antenna and I live on a mountain and I can get 2 channels on different frequencies from different cities but they both happen to be assigned virtual channel 6.  Wonder how my DTV would handle it?    Probably couldn't.

Handles it just fine. Again, the notion of channels being unique is long gone. Tuners no longer key their lookup tables solely on channel number. They now key internally by frequency, antenna input port, embedded callsign, and sub-stream selector. There's tons of identification meta-data embedded in the stream. The channel number is just a label it shows you.

You can launch any number of ATSC streams in your house and give them all the same primary channel number, and the TV will tune them all (and any substreams) just fine as long as the root streams are on different frequencies.

This functionality will allow for transparent translator service, as the next generation translators need not decode the main station and recode with a new channel ID. The tuner can easily tell them apart because it knows they're on different frequencies, but can also see that they're identical streams (all the identifying metadata are identical), so it need only show you the strongest one.

Bear in mind that televisions are no longer tuned to a single frequency at a time, they are constantly scanning the entire band. Only one tuner is dedicated to decoding programming for display, the others are used internally to maintain the lookup table and program guide.

If you guys think this is bad, try foxhunting a misbehaving RF node in a spread-spectrum grid topology. Good times.

If they do make through all that just tell 'em that digital TV transmitters are really analog amplifiers.

[W2PFY]

...i cant verify this, but, i've herd that when the change over is complete here in Canada, the FM  broadcast band is gonna be extended below 88mhz...likely to 76mhz...

I was hoping Canada wouldn't change. I noticed the TV stations in Montreal are still analog. Are they going digital?

[ve6pg]

..ya, they are, but not fer a year, or 2...i dont know what the lower channels are going to be used for in the states, but there would be alot qwarm from tv stations, if they did not move..

..sk..

[KA1ZGC]

That's just it, not all the VHF-Lo stations in the US moved. It's down to less than 20 stations from 2 to 6, but they're there to stay.

The transition did not go as originally planned, the auction had a low turnout, so many stations petitioned to keep their original VHF-Lo channels and won.

That was part of the point I was trying to make earlier, but I can't open my mouth without buzzarding. 

[k4kyv]

Of course, if the Fee-Cee really wanted to expand the FM band, they could force those 20 or so low-band VHF stations to move, just as they did with the radiolocation beacons on 1600-1700 to make room for the expanded AM band. 

The radiolocation beacons were "reaccommodated" by giving them primary status in the 1900-2000 kHz portion of our 160m band.  Fortunately for us, the GPS satellites rendered the cumbersome and expensive 2-mHz radiolocation systems obsolete almost overnight.  Last time I listened, all the beacons had vacated the band, ever since the last holdout on 1952 kHz went dark.

[KA1ZGC]

Of course, if the Fee-Cee really wanted to expand the FM band, they could force those 20 or so low-band VHF stations to move, just as they did with the radiolocation beacons on 1600-1700 to make room for the expanded AM band.

Bingo.

Logical conclusion: they don't really want to, or don't care enough about it to force the issue.

[ve6pg]

..hey don...even with it being summer, noise etc., i herd a french station on 216kc, last night....about 11pm eastern...gud sig too...

..sk..

[kb3ouk]

all the tv's i've seen just put 2 of the same channel in anyway. what is really a pita is trying to tell people around here that the reason they cant get wtaj-10 is because it is now on ch.32 and that just because it came in before on analog doesn't mean they can get digital because they have a vhf antenna and 32 is uhf and then they want to know what vhf and uhf is. btw the best dtv dx i've got is philadephia to here(about 150 miles, from there to fulton county, pa) on ch.6 from wpvi.
Shelby KB3OUK

[WB2YGF]

Well I got my DTA (Digital Transport Adaptor) set up today.  Took about an hour before it got the activation signal from the mother-ship.  While I was waiting, I found a thread about this (Pace DC50X) box and learned about the diagnostic modes I coulld access.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21518134-Digital-Transport-Adapter-Unboxing-Photos?r=0.382838776839105

Interesting thing I found out is due to FCC rules, this DTA cannot have de-encryption because it does not have the required cable card slot (to save money).  Therefore, all the newly unencrypted (clear) DTV channels (108 of them) will stay that way, and be viewable on any standard QAM capable DTV (but with no channel mapping). Silicondust (HDHomeRun company)  has been able to capture the in-band DTA channel mapping stream and convert it to a mapping table.  Hopefully, someone will figure out how to do it for Media Center PC's.

Comcast will turn off most of their analog on 8/11 here.

[WB2YGF]

Update:  I decided to use the DTA as a front end for my Slingbox Pro since the internal analog cable tuner will soon be useless.  Now I can watch my DTA anywhere by internet or by cellphone PDA.  The tricky part was finding a driver for the IR remote control.  Sling still hasn't added the DC50X to their list of cable boxes.

BTW, it's bad enough that wall warts supposedly draw current from the line even when the device they power is off, but in the case of this DTA, there is no way to turn it off and so it runs all the time.  The POWER button on the remote is only designed to turn off the TV.  Not very "green".