Your website is quite interesting. Strange thing though is that your forum seems to be conversations between only two people. I found the following comment somewhat interesting;
Watching the government screw up the digital TV transition makes me dread what would happen if they ever decided we would have a metric transition. The US has planned a transition to digital over-the air TV for many years, over a decade. Major-market stations have had a companion digital station broadcasting for several years. Analog was first supposed to be shut off in 2006, but only if 85% of the market was "ready." As that requirement wasn't met, it was changed to a hard date of 2009-02-17. PSAs have been running and converter boxes have been available for over a year. Because of companion analog and digital stations, there have been twice as many TV stations as there should be over the last few years involving many compromises on frequency and power. Some stations are on their permanent digital frequency and some have to switch from temporary frequencies. With analog off, many will also be allowed to increase power and/or antenna height. After analog shutoff, fewer channels will be needed and the spectrum of channels 52-69 has been resold (but not delivered) for about $20 billion. The Obama team panicked and concluded some 5-6% of the market is not ready and the transition should be delayed. They pushed a bill through Congress moving it to June 12, but many stations had firm plans for tower work or installations, so Congress and the FCC decided they could still shut down Feb. 17 if they wanted to. Then the FCC decided too many want to, and some markets could be left with no analog coverage, only digital. They are generally allowing shutdown as long as at least one station continues analog. However, they are not generally allowing moves to permanent digital frequency, each is case-by-case, requiring FCC approval. Starting 90 days before the June 12 date, stations can shut down early with 30 day notice to the FCC and to viewers. Except they can't broadcast the viewer notices until the Feb 17 shutdowns are out of the way. (30 days from Feb 18 is March 20) So instead of a coordinated plan, 1/3 of the stations will shut down analog on Feb 17 (or before) and the remaining 2/3 somewhere between March 20 and June 12. In addition they may or may not change their digital frequency on the same or a different day.. The FCC's role has switched from enforcing the shutdown on Feb 17 to forbidding excessive shutdown on Feb 17, and generally forbidding frequency changes that were previously required.. Can you imagine if the government were helping us go metric? I believe the author has a very good point. It seems the US can't even change over to only digital signals for TV broadcast. If they can't accomplish this simple task how do you think they would handle metric conversion? The person who responded seems to think it is the US Constitution that is at fault. For whatever the reason, I would agree that under the present governmental system metric conversion will never happen. Jerry ________________________________ From: Paul Armstrong <[email protected]> To: Jeremiah MacGregor <[email protected]> Cc: U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 4:20:56 AM Subject: Re: [USMA:42972] Re: Action: Economic Stimulus Package Everyone should be asking themselves what group they're in and if they're in the first, what they're doing each week to make a difference. If you want to make a difference but can't think of things to do, get onto gometric.us and have a read. If you've got suggestions, make an account and add them to the site. Paul -- End dual-measurement, let's finish going metric! http://gometric.us/ http://www.metric.org/
