Linked by weildish on Tue 6th Jan 2009 17:28 UTC
If you live in the United States, then it's almost certain you've heard about this big digital switch that public television is making due to a new US law. If you live outside of the US, I bet you've heard of it anyway since we like to let people know what we're up to. The big day that's coming up -- February 17th, 2009 -- that magical date when all television stations will historically abandon the infamous analog broadcasting for greener, digital pastures -- didn't strike fear into the hearts at my household. We rarely utilize the antenna, and then only two to four times a year for a special program. Nonetheless, we got our hands on one of those nifty coupons anyway and went out to purchase a digital converter for the sake of those few intrinsic public broadcats. Read on for the whole story.
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Member since:
2006-01-11
And,amazingly, they all managed to reproduce the awful PAL/SECAM/NTSC mess by inventing DVB-T in Europe, 8VSB in the US, and something else in Japan, enabling to raise the price of the gadgets and multiply chip references (and driver development effort for PC decoders)
I've been told that the UHF/VHF bands enables longer propagation distances than current mobile phone frequencies, permitting to reduce the number of transmitters in low population areas.
(Eventually the 8VSB vs. DVB-T debate was also about transmission distance, power efficiency and different use for cities and open areas.)