Re: Wilmington, NC to test "total" analog TV cutoff

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Harry Saal [Harry () saal org]
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2008 5:08 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Re:   Wilmington, NC to test "total" analog TV cutoff

I wonder if a mechanism has been set up to gauge the success or failure
of this wise early community test. Like Alan, I am very skeptical of how
this transition is going to work out. I explored being an early adopter at
my home in Palo Alto and it was a disaster, IMHO. We have a wealth of OTA
digital stations, but they broadcast from three groups of locations:
some from San Francisco, some from the East Bay (exactly 90 degrees away
from SFO) and the remainder from San Jose (exactly 180 degrees away). To
receive any of them, I needed a decent gain directional antenna, not "rabbit
ears". No one direction works well for all three sets of stations in othis
metro market. How many other markets share this situation?

To make things worse, whenever a plane took off or landed at the nearby
Palo Alto Airport, the multi-path interference caused the signal to
go totally out of sync and result in no image or sound, whereas analog
transmissions would just get fuzzy video and clean audio.

In order to keep family harmony, my little "experiment" didn't run very long.


________________________________________
From: Alan [alan () clueserver org<mailto:alan () clueserver org>]
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2008 3:35 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] Wilmington, NC to test "total" analog TV cutoff


Awareness is not going to be the issue, quality of service is going to be
the issue.

I have both digital HD (via antenna) and satellite service. (I can't get
HD satellite signal unless my neighbours lose some trees.) The digital HD
signal fades in and out on a regular basis. (I don't live in a rural area
either.  I live in a heavily populated part of SE Portland, Oregon.)

Analog signals are much more resilient to interference and signal loss. In
many cases I expect people in the switchover will get digital signal but
the quality will be so much inferior than the old analog signal that they
will wonder why it is happening it at all and raise bloody hell.

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