shallowdeep
Posts: 343
Joined: 9/1/2006
From: California
Status: offline
|
I'm glad this thread had a successful resolution, but there were a couple of tangential issues I noticed and wanted to comment on:
quote:
ORIGINAL: LadyHibiscus
I do have a lovely newish TV! I get my local stations, it's the Canadians who are not on the same wavelength!!
Actually, Canada uses the same ATSC standard for digital television broadcasts as the US. If you can receive local television broadcasts with your antenna (as opposed to from your satellite receiver), you should be able to pick up any Canadian DTV broadcasts that are within range. If you get the local channels from satellite, but can't get them from terrestrial over-the-air broadcasts, your TV may not have an ATSC tuner. Depending on the type, televisions manufactured as recently as 2007 were not required to have an ATSC tuner. In that case, a converter box will be required.
quote:
ORIGINAL: LizDeluxe
If you read a little about the digital television conversion it's really interesting. There was a committee of folks who made the final tech decisions on format and stuff... and many of them were representatives of manufacturers of the digital equipment. So instead of selecting the best format they lobbied for their own financial special interests and supposedly we ended up with an inferior OTA digital television system as a a result.
Are you referring to the 8-VSB vs. COFDM controversy? That attracted quite a bit of attention in the late 1990s and into the first few years of the current millennium, but both approaches have advantages and disadvantages from a technical standpoint. Basically, ATSC, using a single-carrier 8-VSB modulation, tends to have better range, but also tends to be more susceptible to multipath interference than an OFDM approach used in other common terrestrial digital TV standards. Given the US market, there were some valid reasons for sticking with ATSC. You can read the FCC engineering report on the debate if you want. It took a few years but, in practice, ATSC receivers were eventually designed to deal with multipath issues effectively by using adaptive equalizers. Even Sinclair, the company that filed the controversy-sparking complaint with the FCC, was eventually satisfied.
The later DVB-T and ISDB-T standards both went with COFDM techniques and have seen wider global adoption, but despite being older, ATSC isn't particularly inferior for fixed television reception with a modern receiver. For high-power broadcasts with a single transmitter common in the US, it actually has some advantages.
|
RE: No Longer A Hostage: OTA Antennas - 
Profile
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread