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US House Kills Proposed Delay For Digital TV Transition
An anonymous reader writes "The Digital TV transition delay bill has failed to pass the United States House of Representatives. By a vote 258 to 168 in favor of changing the date, the bill has failed as two-thirds of the votes are required for it to pass. The delay bill was once perceived as inevitable, [but the House] has now apparently made February 17th the date of transition once again. Now the question remains, will they attempt to pass it again by the deadline?"
Thomas says this is a rule suspension vote. It takes a 2/3 vote to suspend the rules and pass a bill. Usually this is reserved for bills that are not very controversial and have broad support.
This failure just means that the bill will have to go to the rules committee. After a rule is passed and the bill is brought up under that rule, a simple majority is all that is needed to pass the bill.
This is just a very small bump in the road to extend the deadline.
considering the Senate passed the bill unanimously, I figured it would easily make it through the House.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Maybe we should say TV is the primary source of LOCAL news and weather.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
red is a pivot color for the two difference signals Y and I, so you might get more noise from interference with the sound band. the buzzing that changes with flashing black letters would be a good thing with "you are stupid."
red does look like high modulation on a scope, but that's deceiving. reason is that BLACK is full power in NTSC, and white is no power in the video channel. what color is your static? so going to black is pure evil, if it persists for more than a minute or so, you will start tripping transmitters.
if the system doesn't trip out, of course, from overload, then you lose output tubes, possibly transformers, and any weak spots in the RF cage can get trashed. they don't like less than 20% modulation, aka 80% power load, on a sustained basis.
io fact, 20% is the "pedestal level" at which the CRT electron guns should be cut off, full received black.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The digital signal I get is a little flaky but they are supposed to boost the signal after the switch.
they? Changes in digital facilities at the cut-over date vary on a case by case basis.
There are going to be fewer channels available for tv after the switch. We'll be using 2 through 51, except there is no channel 37 (that's kept silent for radio astronomy).
Some stations will use the same digital facilities after the switch, so those probably won't improve.
Some of the digital signals already on are using channels above 51 and will move. Due to interference issues, some digital signals are temporarily using lower power and/or a different channel. Those stations will likely have a change in signal coverage (mostly for the better) when the transition is complete.
Some stations that are digital on UHF now will move to VHF channels (perhaps their former analog channel) when the analog signal is shut down. Although that may mean a better signal for some viewers, those who installed a UHF-specific antenna for DTV may find their antenna marginal.
UHF antennas still pick up some VHF signal, more so with channels 7-13 than 2-6, but one would have to be in a pretty strong signal area for that to work.
Some stations will be buying antennas or other equipment from other stations as channel-switches occur (transmitting antennas are generally made for a specific channel or narrow range of them)
Rescheduling antenna and general engineering work will be a headache at the switch if the date changes.
Whatever you're using now, plan on using the channel-scan function to relocate stations that have moved after the change. In some places there may be new channels coming on the air (some are low power) scanning periodically to see what's out there isn't a bad idea.
You can see what's licensed or has construction permits for the various types of tv stations using the FCC TV database.
You can get an idea of relative signal coverage as well as what's in your area at tvfool.com. Seeing different colors for various relative signal levels in a stations' coverage is very helpful in determining what kind of antenna you might need to get a particular station.
Using a good outdoor antenna, a preamp at the antenna, and modern low loss coax cable makes a huge difference for weak signals.
Some areas have analog low-power tv or translator (rebroadcast on shifted channel) stations that will continue to operate after the switch. If you're using a DTV converter for an analog tv you'll need a converter with a "pass-through" feature to allow those signals to bypass the converter and still get to the tv. (may require turning converter off for pass-through, much like behavior with old VCRs when not using VCR tuner)
This transition only affects over-the-air broadcasts! If Cox is pulling your analog then it's a pure coincidence.
The money is derived from the sale of the bandwidth, not your tax dollars.
If you have a CATV-compatible television (and it's been a very long time since anything other than that was manufactured), then you, the cable-TV subscriber, will be fine, even without a digital receiver box.
The problem is that Cox, COMCAST & others have been misleading customers into thinking that they must upgrade to all-digital service, or their TVs will go dark. That's just not true.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
For emergencies the internet simply falls flat due to almost certainly not working.
You must be too young to have been around for 9/11. I'm old enough to have been online at the time, and working at a business class ISP. I honestly don't recall any net related problems. Traffic was not notably higher than a typical workday, per MRTG. I don't remember reading anything noteworthy on the NANOG mailing list at that time. Of course onesie-twosie operators whom had POPs in the WTC had a very bad day, but one or two companies is not "the internet".
If your definition of "the net" is just one news site, perhaps your local paper or something, and it happened to be down, then that's too bad for you, but the rest of the world was OK.
I recall CNN went to just one static story on their page but it was quite responsive the whole day. Slashdot had multiple intentional "dupes" opened roughly every one thousand comments to reduce loading times. I recall logging into IRC and on to a channel that someone had gatewayed a telecaptioning decoder off a news station, so you could "watch" live news TV captions. I believe that is how I "watched" the pentagon plane news.
When, exactly, was the last time "the net" was down, anyway? The Morris worm? I personally had the very bad luck to be the duty engineer on call the night the MS SQL blaster worm was released. That was, in fact, a very bad day, but overall "the net" hardly stopped working.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
How many times do we have to tell you people!? TV's hooked up to cable won't be affected!