US Switch To DTV Countdown Begins

s31523 writes "In February lawmakers postponed the switch from analog to digital TV. Now, the new June 12th deadline is upon us with no sign of another delay. CNET is reporting that the President himself has stated, '... I want to be clear: there will not be another delay.' So it looks like it is going to happen, for real this time. Even with the delay, there are still estimated to be millions of unprepared viewers. Local stations may participate in the voluntary 'Analog nightlight' services in which TV stations agree to keep an analog signal turned on in addition to their digital signals to provide information about the DTV transition and to notify unprepared TV viewers of emergencies, such as hurricanes."

Comments

Re:Analog nightlight?

[tonyreadsnews]

More than half the stations broadcasting the "analog nightlight" service will remain on air for 30 days. And the rest will be on for at least two weeks. In total, these stations will reach 69 percent of TV households.

Re:I have already faced my worst nightmare

[sribe]

Well, I live in a kind of remote rugged location, and since the switch to DTV my picture is much better. Now my internet access gets flaky when it's windy--lower transmitting tower...

Analog TV had the best weather/emergency coverage

[An dochasac]

During a weather emergency, the TV not the first place I go

Unless you're driving, analog TV is (was) the best place to go for weather emergency info because:

• Weather radar can quickly and visually indicate where the storm is, how fast its moving and in what direction. Anyone with a vague idea of where they live can see whether the worst is behind or ahead.
• Neither NOAA nor commercial AM/FM stations can possibly give neighborhood granularity coverage fast enough.
• Bad weather makes for good ratings so during hurricanes, tropical storms, supercell storms, tornadoes, you're likely to get good coverage from several stations, radar in the corner of the screen, text crawling across the bottom giving locale updates much faster than a radio stations 20 minute/hourly update cycle.
• Because TV is a big profitable industry, a typical transmitter is much more powerful and has better coverage than a typical NOAA 162.xx MHz transmitter.
• TV coverage during any storm is almost always better than AM/FM coverage

for relevant information. Noaa.gov, weather.com, and/or a local AM "News and weather station" are my collective first choice.

Static on analog AM (455-1600kHz) can tell you a thunderstorm is 50-100 miles away. Beyond that I'd say analog AM and FM radio is all but useless. The news cycles are too long, there are too many clear channel and autoDJ and syndicated stations. (I've been there, camping at 4:00a.m., emergency sirens come on, I scan the radio dial for information and here 1940s music, Art Bell, Industrial music and static...)

NOAA transmitters are typical of heavy government, by time a weather event is verified enough to get into the update cycle, it has probably passed you. NOAA transmitters are pathetically weak and placed in locations where their line of sight coverage is abysmal. Cross any great lake and you're likely to pick up TV stations the whole way across but you won't pick up any NOAA station more than 10 miles offshore. (In my case not even this far because the nearest station was about 15 miles inland!) Try this, get one of those TV/weather radios (before tomorrow morning!) scan through the T.V. channels and if you are within 25 miles of a big city, you'll probably get some TV stations and if you hear a NOAA station at all, it will be very weak.

Now here is the rub, not only is digital TV an all or nothing affair which has a wider area of 'perfect picture', but a much smaller area of 'usable picture', but to date there are no portable battery operated televisions capable of receiving a DTV signal. Yes you could run your DTV converter off an inverter, and someone has even created one which runs on half a dozen D batteries, but DTV decoding is computationally intensive which means it burns through batteries much faster than your Analog LCD TV. Gaps in weather and other emergency coverage will eventually be seen as one of the unintended consequences of the government mandated forced obsolescence of analog TV. A second unintended consequence is that millions of TVs will end up in landfills before their time because their owner is either out of DTV range, or he isn't technically savvy enough to hook up a converter. The third unintended consequence is that themanufacturers of new televisions will have a very good year. DTV was sold in the pre-internet days on the premise that it would provide jobs for EEs after the downsizing of NASA and the military. It has provided jobs, but unfortunately very few of these jobs have been within the U.S. And now we're stuck with "the worlds first DTV system" which was designed when MS Windows didn't even have a TCP stack and the 'web' consisted of a few dozen organizations, email and usenet. My point here being that after all of the money spent on DTV, it is within 5 years of being irrelevant thanks to youtube and similar video services and more efficient codecs.