The Dutch Kill Analog TV Nationwide 401
Willem de Koning writes Yesterday the Netherlands completely ended transmission of analog television signals, becoming the first country in the world to do so. So what about cars and portable TVs? I'm guessing a market will emerge for portable set top boxes / converters." The article mentions the timetable for other countries to go all-digital; by 2011 most or all of the developed world will have made the switch.
Uh, huh... (Score:4, Interesting)
And all those obsolete TVs will be dumped in the third world for scrap prices. Going digital might be nice as long as it doesn't destroy the environment and set the third world further back.
2011? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does the 2011 prediction assume that the US won't push the date back again? Does it assume that the reasons for US politicians to push the date back don't apply to politicians in other countries?
The conversion from analog to digital TV is in progress. Trying to guess now when the tipping point will actually occur is useless.
the future is changing? (Score:2, Interesting)
Digital signals don't work in cars: doppler effect (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably mucho DSP power will eventually compensate, but don't expect portable units to pick up digital TV signals terribly well if they are moving for at least the next several years.
Re:Uh, huh... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I know of two cable guys who would disagree with that statement. They'd point out that there are probably more people who earn less than $25,000 in the inner city who own new HDTVs than you'd find in most middle-class neighborhoods. And by the time 2009 comes around these television sets will be even cheaper, assuming people dont just get adapters. I just hope that in the US we don't start seeing tax dollars go to handouts to provide assistance to people who supposedly can't afford a brand new TV set.
FM Origins (was Back in the old days) (Score:3, Interesting)
FM is something we owe to the late Edwin Armstrong, a former employee of RCA. In fact, he was pretty much on his own to get FM out, but was able to prove it to the FCC and actually had a frequency band allocated. Armstrong was hoping to make something from the royalties off his invention.
David Sarnoff (head of RCA) was a major asshole during this arena. You see
Unfortunately, the rumblings with RCA left Armstrong on the losing end and despite all the work and the major contribution to modern communications, he committed suicide.
Obligatory Wiki here [wikipedia.org].
Re:Digital TV is far superior (Score:3, Interesting)
Is that kind of like Wiley-Coyote knowing about gravity, and suddenly being affected by it?
I actually see the effects of overly-compressed digital video all the time, as I have satellite TV. It's occasionally annoying, but not really a big deal. I haven't watched a lot of over-the-air digital TV, but I've yet to see artifacts, only poor signal quality from a station that's 35 miles away on my ad-hoc antenna.
Re:really should be DVB tell me why ATSC ? (Score:4, Interesting)
ATSC requires less energy to transmit than DVB-T, due to the use of 8VSB modulation rather than OFDM; hence it is cheaper to use. If the USA were as densely packed as most of Europe, then DVB-T would probably be a slam dunk, but we have vast rural areas, and idiotically-built suburbs, and the TV signal needs to reach its audience at a cost that the broadcasters can sustain.
ATSC = Red State TV. (Score:3, Interesting)
Sadly, the changeover to digital TV could have been a golden opportunity for the world to settle on a single standard for television, something we've never had. I guess the significance of analog TV is waning, but I've spent my whole life thinking that the whole NTSC/PAL/SECAM incompatibility thing was really a waste, and that maybe when everyone switched to digital, they'd see the light and not go down that road again.
EU law has been applied then ! (Score:2, Interesting)
ach, that's silly (Score:4, Interesting)
every major metropolitan area is served with numerous 5KW radio stations, and those below midband are predictably audible across the SMSA boundary almost all the time, which encompasses radiuses of 20 to 40 miles.
on such technical material are the frequencies, powers, and beam patterns of radio licenses calculated. this is well-trodden ground, the number of communications lawyers in Washington, DC is second only to the K-street melange of political lobbyists, and they all use the same polar calculations to insure that radio KRAP applies for a license they can actually get authorized and sell enough ads to make money on.
amateur and shortwave radio can be expected at various bands and at various times, to be useable for two-way communications worldwide.
the 20-mile limit of Doctor Crumb needs some documentation. Soviet "chord" jamming of the 60s had to be done at the 100 to 200 KW level to drown out the state-run shortwave transmitters of Europe and the US, clearly audible any hour day or night in the US, and with the european state stations running up to 250 KW, they still got listeners.
yes, inverse-square laws apply. so do good construction principles. in the 1920s, primitive tube radios were made with great sensitivity, and if you had a good set, there was no problem listening on one coast of the US to the other coast nightly. that usually requires better than a 1 microvolt per meter sensitivity, and just about any crummy one-chip radio can do that today.
I might buy 20 miles for UHF television, merely because this follows line of sight rules with no skywave. but you can erect a tower of 1 + (4/3 (earth radius)) = h in feet and place an antenna, and get the signal of a typical TV broadcaster 35 KW or higher for over a hundred miles on any production TV set.
no, it gets back to hunger for frequencies, the desire of governments to reassign these frequencies in costly auctions for big dollars, and a serendipitous moment of technology change they can exploit for the purpose to explain why analog commercial broadcasting is going, going, gone. if they ever wanted to get the REALLY big bucks, move the technology into their military nets and sell THAT excess bandwidth. in the US, the military controls 99% of all assignable bandwidth DC to daylight, and has not given up one single 400 Hz channel since the Communications Act of 1939.
Dutch also means German (Score:1, Interesting)
This is the national anthem of the Netherlands:
Wilhelmus van Nassouwe
ben ik, van Duitsen bloed,
den vaderland getrouwe
blijf ik tot in den dood.
Een Prinse van Oranje
ben ik, vrij, onverveerd,
den Koning van Hispanje
heb ik altijd geëerd.
The first lines are translated as follows:
William of Nassau, scion
Of a Dutch and ancient line,
I dedicate undying
Faith to this land of mine.
My literal translation of the first two lines:
William of Nassau
am I, of Dutch blood...
In short it is odd to claim that "Dutch" is an English invention.
Another option for NTSC televisions (Score:3, Interesting)
I assume, and this might be crazy on my part, that all of the stations that the obsolete TVs used to receive will be blank or raw static. In this case, people who set up illegal small area broadcast stations are getting a free communications medium along with an attentive audience. Play videos such as Hollywood films (if you're already illegal due to your broadcasting, then what difference does copyright infringement make?) and/or YouTube-type stuff and intersplice it with your own political viewpoints instead of commercials. Keep loose and mobile with your transmitter. It will only be the poor people who will be watching your illegal broadcasts because all the middle-class will have cable.
I really don't believe that NTSC broadcasting is going to go away in the USA. There's too much of an audience that would be lost for the advertisers.
Wrong again (Score:3, Interesting)
The huge amount of lead (much more than half the weight) that a TV contains is in the form of lead-glass.
The lead-glass is not ever going to be diluted by water, so that's a complete non-issue.
There are other sources of lead, like the solder used, but it's not that large an amount, lead isn't very soluble in water and all landfills have a watertight membrane underneath to keep the nasties out of the ground water.
Don't worry about it.
That said it's a bit silly to scrap tvs just because their turners don't work, with SCART (read:The RGB inputs on all european tvs) and the fact that most DVB is still Lowres you can just use an external tuner and the result will be just as nice (or nicer) as if you had changed the entire tv.