And while I'm on this thread .. Having experienced both analog and digital broadcast TV, there's one thing about analog that I'm really going to miss. Analog signals are more "readable" under weak signal conditions than digital -- digital has a better quality picture as long as the bitstream is coming through intact, but it doesn't take much of a bit error rate to start showing compression artifacts, and not much above that, bam! no more signal. Ask any ham operator familiar with ATV what they mean by the P0-P5 scale of picture quality .. P0-P1 is such poor quality the broadcasters won't stand for it, but if it will hold sync on the TV at least, you can at least read callsign cards and have some idea of what's in the image even through horrendous amounts of noise, and P2- P3 signals are good enough to be able to get useful info from the video even if they look terrible.
Where this really becomes a major concern is how well DTV gets emergency info into areas that need it quickly, for example, towns in the path of a tornado passing through a station's reception footprint. Analog broadcast can get into those areas even if they're outside the B-contour of the station, at least for a visible enough signal to get the warning. DTV has a sharper cutoff below minimal *broadcast quality* signal strength, and the signal gets unintelligible a lot faster as it degrades than analog does, mainly because while our eyes can adjust for noisy analog signals quite well, they're not evolved to adjust for scrambled compressed digital images. If the LPTV and translator licensing business weren't so colossally screwed up (mainly from application-spamming by a certain extremely aggressive religious group that's so flooded the FCC with LPTV/ translator applications that they literally don't know which way is up with them right now!), I'd say LPTV would be the niche for analog broadcast to fill the gap on this. But because it's not possible for *anyone* to get an LPTV or translator license right now, we're stuck with the high-power migration to DTV with no workaround. There are people in local and state emergency management treating this as a serious potential issue right now .. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
