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The Dutch Kill Analog TV Nationwide
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.
... by 2011 most or all of the developed world will have made the switch.
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.
They only discontinued analog broadcasts over the air. The majority of people in the Netherlands get their television service through analog cable and not digital service.
In the USA and most other countries, color TV signals are backwards compatible with the older black and white standards. Old B&W sets worked just fine on color broadcasts. That's one reason why analog color still looks so crappy to this day: the way color signal was shoehorned into the original standard creates a lot of visual artifacts.
Where are you from? In the US the NTSC color signal was specifically developed to maintain compatibility with B&W sets so that no one needed to buy a new TV if they didn't want to. I was under the impression that PAL/SCEAM were developed to do the same thing, but carrying the color information in a different way so it was more stable and immune to noise.
I know early FM radios don't work now (because RCA got the FCC to move the FM dial's portion of the spectrum in a deliberate attempt to kill the technology), but I've never heard of that with color TV.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Actually, the state-supported media are more objective than any of the commercial channels.
Any club of people that can raise a significant number of members will get
public funding and can participate in the public channel. There are broadcasting organisations
with socialist, catholic, buddhist, islam, etc. backgrounds, and they all get their voice.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
Finally RCA, which owned NBC, developed "compatible" color television sets. This is what became our "modern" NTSC sets.
And that's also why NBC was used to use a peacock and advertise itself as "an all color network." It's also why all Star Trek (The Original Series) episodes are in color, yet the first year of "Lost In Space" is in B&W.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
Never The Same Color? ;)
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.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Its you silly English people who name us "the dutch", and our country either "The Netherlands" or even worse "Holland".
We name ourselves (as a country) "Nederland", which is inhabited by "nederlanders".
But I don't see what Dutch investment in the US has to do with anything in this article.
It doesn't, he's just bragging that he personally owns the entire state you live in.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
my real point is- radio waves do not respect borders....
So what?
Ending analogue transmissions isn't intended as a punitive or repressive measure, it's meant to save a laughably small amount of money by ending a service that wasn't really used much anymore.
All these foreign channels are available on their laughably small (analogue) cable networks, free for them to watch on their teeny tiny little TV sets in their silly little houses.
Radio waves may not respect borders, but they *do* respect the inverse square law, i.e. they don't travel indefinitely. A quick search says that most US radio stations (and I assume tv stations) have a broadcast range of approximate 20 miles. The Netherlands (Holland is a province) has an area of 16,033 sq mi, which means that over 2/3 of the country is out of range of foreign broadcasts.
Actually, the state-supported media are more objective than any of the commercial channels.
Any club of people that can raise a significant number of members will get
public funding and can participate in the public channel. There are broadcasting organisations
with socialist, catholic, buddhist, islam, etc. backgrounds, and they all get their voice.
In addition to this, you have to realize
1) public broadcasters also feature advertising
2) it has been known for a public broadcaster to become a commercial broadcaster (veronica)
3) workers from failed commercial broadcasters have been known to rejoin the public system (tv10)
All of this mitigates the influence of government. (And the government money mitigates undue influence from advertisers).
The public broadcasters themselves are independent member-run organizations and can (and have) defied government positions. More successfully than the BBC has managed, for instance (turns out they were right about reports about Iraq's weapons being 'sexed up', but they didn't have the balls to say to the government 'you can put in a complaint like any regular citizen').
Additionally, public broadcasters are required by law to have editorial codes that guarantee editorial/journalistic independence for their employees - independence from both the government, advertisers AND the broadcaster itself. The journalist's trade union is always keen to complain about instances of this independence being threatened.
Getting impartial/non-partisan news is hardly the problem. The problem is that the news is either boring (especially the christian broadcasters, always yapping on about 'church matters' or, for some not well understood reason, every minute detail of the troubles in Israel) or alarmist and/or xenophobic drivel designed to compete with the commercial channels.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Does it really sound like the public is being served by the private media? Don't you wish we would have been a bit savvier when, through being misinformed, we supported our politicians in their attack on Iraq?
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.
www.wavefront-av.com
A quick search says that most US radio stations (and I assume tv stations) have a broadcast range of approximate 20 miles.
20 miles? Are you sure about that? I live in fairly hilly terrian at the bottom of a valley and can tune in even the low powered stations from further away then that -- using nothing more then a indoor wire antenna.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
radio signals from the vast majority of US broadcasters, at 5 kilowatts power, are regularly audible over 120 miles. skywave bounces off the ionosphere cause pockets of listenability for many thousands of miles. the "B" contour of most commercial TV broadcasters, running 25 KW to 100 KW of power audio and 10 to 50 Kw video, where some interference is likely but a good picture is pulled in almost all the time with an external gain antenna beam, runs 50 to 80 miles out.
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.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?