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Spectrum Wars: The Hidden Battle
PacketMaster writes: "The USA Today is carrying an interesting commentary entitled All-but-secret battle rages over fate of airwaves. The article sheds light on some topics that many people are completely ignorant on - the fight over the broadcast spectrum. The most interesting tidbit is that the current broadcasters, who were given the new digital spectrum for applications like HDTV for free, now want to keep their old ones too and auction them off for industry profit to help pay for the transition to the new spectrum."
Which seems to be quite a few knee-jerk posters...
The point of the article was that the broadcast industry wants to profit from the sale of the analog spectrum they agreed to return to the public in 2006. They were given the new spectrum, valued at over 70 billion, for free. So, they want to take our property, and sell it.
In addition the current military spectrum is very much desired. The military would either like to keep it, or obtain the anaolog spectrum from broadcasters. Some folks in congress want to auction off the military spectrum, and the debate is whether the money goes to the military to help convert to another spectrum, or to other programs.
There are several providers of satellite radio. The target market is mostly high end cars. Two popular ones are Sirius Radio and XM Radio. If I had the money, I'd love to give it a try. I believe they're subscription based, but it's probably well worth it. Has anyone here used such a service?
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Digital Television != High Definition Television.
Of course HDTV typically has a digital signal (some countries actually have tried analog high-def signals), but digital television just means using a digital signal instead of analog and that can include the contemporary TV format.
Afterall digital cable companies and satelite providers already commonly transmit digital signals of contemporary sized and formatted television programs.
The plan was to transmit over air TV signals digitally because it is a more efficient use of spectrum than analog and then retire the analog transmissions once there was sufficient penetration of TVs that could read and decode digital signals.
Of course the companies would like to get everyone behind the higher res, wider, bandwidth hungry HDTV format and spew that all over the air waves as well or exclusively, but personally that seems more like a marketing gimmick than an especially useful technology. Even if digital broadcasting takes off, don't expect all the shows on the air to be HDTV formatted, at least not any time soon.
Digital communication is inherently immune to noise caused by several types of interference. Many channel encoding schemes exist precisely to deal with interference that is typical of the frequency range of the band, doppler effects, echoes, etc. Yes, there is a statistically small amount of bit error you will receive given a statistically small amount of noise energy present in the band, but there is no recent trend of rising noise energy in any given frequency band.
So don't worry, your phone, tv, AM/FM radio, talkabout, bluetooth device, etc will not eventually stop working due to the noise level passing some magic threshold.
For more info, look at the frequency allocation on the FCC web pages:
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/osmhome/allochrt.pdf