You're vastly overestimating analog radio. AM tops out at around 10kHz bandwidth, but it's so noisy you're never going to hear most of it. FM tops out around 15kHz, with higher frequencies rolling off sharply to protect the stereo pilot tone at 19kHz. Of course digital formats will slaughter high frequencies as well, but analog really doesn't have it so great.
Right now, the FM digital setups provide about 100kbps of total bandwidth (numbers vary with configuration), with the option to expand that more if you're willing to start encroaching on any high frequency analog subcarriers you might have. A lot of setups won't even use all 100kbps by default unless you manually change things around to fill it out. I'm sure a lot of stations that run only one audio stream are only at around 50kbps and don't even know it.
Sound quality is surprisingly good for such low bandwidth, but I wouldn't go so far as to describe it as CD quality. The real benefit in my opinion is getting rid of all the random noise. That's much more apparent on AM than FM, but even when I switch from a digital FM station to analog the first thing I always notice is how noisy it is.
The real advantage for broadcasters is that networks can now bring more of their services to a particular market without buying more transmitters or trying to get a license to build new ones. The little independent stations who broadcast standalone aren't going to pick up that many listeners, but networks duplicating already existing services and bringing them to new cities might be able to pick up a lot more ears when you look at things on a network wide basis. It remains to be seen, but I think multicasting has a lot of potential.
I suspect that you're right about wireless internet eventually taking over, but we aren't even close to being there yet. Right now a single AM station can cover several states, and reach millions of people. Try serving a few million people with individual audio streams at 64kbps. The bandwidth adds up fast, and our cellular networks are already performing pretty dismally under the relatively light load they have now (at least in my area). Until telcos get their asses in gear and build out their networks (yeah, right) radio is going to remain a much cheaper way to bring audio to all the people stuck in rush hour traffic every weekday.
I wasn't suggesting that analog radio was going away. I don't know about the status of all digital HD either, but there isn't anybody even beginning to think about it yet.
As far as I know there aren't any other digital audio formats approved for use in the sidebands. Actually, nothing I know of period is approved for the sidebands. The things you're thinking of are subcarriers on the analog signal, which for the most part don't require explicit approval. FMeXtra is one of those subcarrier formats. It's not a bad idea, except for the fact that a lot of stations already have a pretty full subcarrier load that they'd have to completely wipe out to implement it.
You're right, we could see a subcarrier format rise up to compete with it. Hell, HD radio and a subcarrier format could actually both be used at the same time. We could also see another sideband format come in to play, but I highly doubt the FCC would ever approve another one. They did learn a little something from crap like AM-stereo.
Radio really needed some kind of boost to prove that it could still be revelant, and I think it's sad that things have gone this way. Like it or not, digital radio means ibiquity HD radio now.
If you think DTV is bad, you should check out HD Radio. Rather than use one of several much more open standards available to them, the FCC requires that digital radio be in ibiquity's crappy format.
Want to transmit in digital? You need to use ibiquity's software, there is no other option. Oh, and you owe them a few grand per year per transmitter as well. Building a receiver? You get the decoder chips from them, and pay them fees. I hear they've finally let some other companies start building chips since they've been too inept to make one that will work in a portable device.
It's too bad, I think digital radio could be pretty valuable as far as keeping radio relevant, but the FCC decided to screw everyone instead.
Unless you focused on buying power saving components or a particularly efficient power supply, it wouldn't be totally unreasonable to assume about 100W for a desktop PC at idle. This wall wart computer probably pulls down about 5W when idle. The specifications page for the product lists 19W as the capacity of the power supply and I'm sure it's rated for more than it will ever need. An external USB drive with a script that powers it down after it isn't used for a period of time probably isn't going to add much more, figure 10W for the wall wart server and drive just as a nice round number.
Keeping them both on 24/7, the desktop will suck down 72 kWh per month, and the wall wart 7.2 kWh. Depending on your electric rates, that could be the difference between $100/yr for the desktop and $10/yr for the wall wart.
At speed it happens that the pitch angle is very small -- too small to notice -- but it's there. It has to be. Yes, I'm a private pilot.
You could make a Bernoulli wing to accomplish the same thing, but then it would interfere at other angles of attack. In particular, a pronounced hump on the top of the wing would make the wing more prone to airflow separation and stalling.
Sorry, but that's simply untrue. A "Bernoulli wing" (normally referred to as a cambered wing) will produce lift at zero and even negative angles of attack. They aren't in any way more prone to stalling, and are almost universally used on modern aircraft. Modern computer simulation has produced wing sections that have dramatically increased lift/drag ratios and reduced separation compared to symmetric sections.
Bernoulli's effect is nothing more than conservation of energy. You can see it's effects on any surface that produces lift, no matter if it's cambered, symmetrical, or just a flat plate. Conservation of energy demands that when air is in the high pressure region under a wing it slows down. Air in the low pressure region above the wing speeds up. It's a simple exercise to prove that these high and low pressure regions exist with a wing section in a wind tunnel. Add a hot-wire anemometer to the wind tunnel and you can see the speed changes as well. I've done several such experiments myself.
A few disclaimers apply, this only works at mach numbers below about 0.3 Above that airflows start to show the effects of compression. It also only works outside the wing's boundary layer, where viscous effects dominate. Air under mach 0.3 and away from a surface can be treated as incompressible and inviscid. Bernoulli effect only applies in inviscid and incompressible flows.
Yes, I'm a pilot. I also have a degree in aerospace engineering.
I hate to reply to myself, but I just noticed that my previous post was very ambiguous. I was saying that everyone used openoffice. I was trying to imply that special education discounts of Microsoft office were still too expensive. The professors changing to.doc as the default format was specifically done for compatibility with openoffice. (I guess it was for office 2003 as well, but all the students I knew using microsoft office just pirated the new version anyway.)
Just about every engineering student I went to college with was using it. Mostly because even the discounted $45 version we had access to was just too much money for something that didn't get used except to type reports and occasionally make a graph in excel. When office 2007 came out and professors started sending out.docx files to students that could no longer read them, there was so much bitching from the student community that all the professors had the default file format set back to the old.doc format by the end of the week.
Re:A button for switching main boot hard disk...
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
·
· Score: 1
While I don't fundamentally disagree with anything you just said, it's really not as big an issue as you're making it out to be.
You want to just take a drive out, throw it in a system and have it work? You can install the bootloader on multiple drives pretty easily. Whatever drive is the first boot device in BIOS is the one that gets used. Worried about getting the wrong/dev/sda,b,c,d.. etc? This problem has been solved for years, and I'm surprised by how often it still comes up. Just identify partitions by UUID, and never have device names screw up a boot again.
Is it an optimal situation? Hell no. It's probably what we're stuck with for the foreseeable future though, and it isn't terribly hard to work around the specific issue that you're complaining about.
I'm not sure where you've gotten the idea that there's a no fly zone around NYC, because there isn't one. There's plenty of uncontrolled airspace above the Hudson, and lots of helicopters fly up the river without even needing to contact air traffic control. The only city that has a permanent no fly zone above it is Washington DC.
When we see a bag someone has left on a bench, we have to evacuate 4 square miles and call in the bomb squad.
This reminds me of a story I saw awhile back in the paper. A "strange object" was found near the courthouse, and the bomb squad was called in. Once the bomb squad arrived, it was determined that the object was a float from a toilet tank. Thank god they were there to protect the populous from errant toilet parts.
-Requiring high altitudes for all planes, military or civilian
I think these are in place. Last time I saw a flight map for a city, there were huge no fly circles around it. I'm not a pilot but I think that's been around for a while.
Unless that city was Washington DC, you're interpreting that map wrong. No-fly zones, officially called prohibited airspace, are not very common and when present are usually quite small. You were probably looking at class B or C airspace, which is open to flight to all aircraft, as long as they are in contact with air traffic control.
The applicable regulations for minimum altitude (paraphrased, I don't have them memorized) basically say that in sparsely populated areas, you must have 500 ft of separation from any person, building, vehicle, or structure. In heavily populated areas you must have enough altitude for a safe emergency landing in the event of engine failure. That's basically all the guidance pilots get in terms of official regulations.
Mount Vesuvius is still considered active, and it isn't all that far south. Historically, multiple areas further north were volcanically active as well.
On the other hand, it's a guarantee that when they step into "the real world" they're going to have to deal with jerks, liars, and blowhards.
Hmm. First of all, how often does it come up? I'm pretty sure I live in the real world and in my experience it's pretty rare.
Okay, I usually stay out of arguments like this, but are you serious? Are you self employed, or only work in a very small business? If you find yourself in a situation where you can pick and choose who you interact with or only superficially interact with people on a short term basis, I can understand how you could come to this conclusion. I work in a midsize business, in a department where I have to deal with every other department. The vast majority of the people I work with are good people, but at least once a day I'm forced to deal with an asshole, a liar, or someone trying to bully me into getting their way. Everybody will inevitably come up against people like this in their lives at some point, and you'd better know how to stand up for yourself and work around them.
On the off chance that you work for a large business where everybody in the entire organization is great and has no personality flaws, let me know so I can come work there and never have to deal with jerks again. I highly doubt such an organization exists, but it's nice to think about.
Well, some of the larger 747 models have a maximum takeoff weight of over 900,000 pounds. I wouldn't expect ballistic recovery systems for them just yet.
You don't have to spend a lot of time on driver training. Just make the driver test somewhat harder, and make it necessary to retake every three years for everyone under 40, and two years for everyone over 40, to retain their driver license. (I choose those numbers because that's what you have to do to retain your pilot certification.)
Just a nitpick, but that's the interval that third class medicals expire at. All pilots need a flight review every two years to stay current.
The resulting explosive decompression tore off a large section of the roof
Whoever wrote that has no idea what kind of forces are involved. Here's what really happened.
A crack opened up, the resulting "explosive" decompression bent some of the outer skin upwards, through the boundry layer and into the airstream proper. Aircraft are constructed with a semi-monocoque design in which the skin carries a large portion of the forces involved. The crack severely weakened the skin, and the drag force from the edge of the crack being forced into the airflow pealed the skin of the aircraft back until it finally broke and separated entirely.
This left the aircraft flying at full speed with a rather large hole in the fuselage. The airflow over that hole would have become extremely turbulent. It'd be like being inside a giant pipe organ where the air is coming in at four hundred miles per hour. This extremely strong airflow is what tossed the stewardess out, and threw debris around and injured the passengers. Decompression had nothing to do with it other than the initial bending of the skin. If the break were at a place where the skin were more reinforced, none of the injuries would have happened. Sudden decompression would move light objects around, and would probably give your ears a nasty pop, but nobody is going to get sucked out just from that alone.
You realize that your source for the US lists the federal tax separately, right? Federal tax adds another $.18 per gallon to the state values listed. Many states allow local taxes and fees to be added as well. It's pretty common to be paying at least $.40 per gallon.
I know you've been posting this all over the place, but I don't see how what he said is wrong. You're still going to have to emit a signal of some sort, and that signal is still going to take up part of the available spectrum. You may be able to reduce information that would otherwise have to be modulated in a conventional way, thus reducing the sidebands, thus reducing interference to adjacent channels. If you could get this to the point that you don't have to use conventional modulation at all, then the sidebands would get incredibly small, but the carrier would still be there.
Yes, these were in what would be considered low earth orbit. How much of a problem this is going to be depends on how many other objects are in nearby orbits that may collide with part of this cloud. The thing about atmospheric drag is that the atmosphere isn't really all that uniform. How a chunk of wrecked satellite with an unknown shape and size is going to react can be predicted, but only to a certain extent. Yes, everything will eventually fall down, even the stuff in a "higher orbit." Those orbits were just made more elliptical, and will eventually come down to about the same altitude the collision happened at. It's going to take awhile though, and those pieces that are too small to track are going to spread over wider and wider areas until they finally reenter. People will be furiously calculating probabilities of collisions for a long time. Decaying 'quickly' is relative I guess, while there is drag to bring them down, pieces will still be up there for years.
That's a question you'd have to answer by looking at FCC filings for the stations in your area because every area will be different. Every change to their transmission, like power increases, requires an updated filing so you can be sure that if a station changes anything, they'll do it all at once. As far as current power levels, many stations are moving digital to an old analog frequency after the change, others may increase power a bit, some are already running the exact digital configuration they'll use post transition. Every station's situation is different.
In my area, one station has been at 100% digital power for a long time. When they switch, they'll just turn off the analog transmitter. Every other station here is moving their digital signal into their old analog frequency, resulting in massive power reductions for them. Of course the changes in how VHF propagates compared to UHF means they'll actually have better digital signal than they do now, even with the massively reduced power.
I'd check a site like tvfool.com to check out what plans for the stations in your area are pre and post-transition.
50 kW is a tiny TV transmitter. Try 1000-1500 kW for a more realistic value for an analog UHF station, 300+ kW for an analog VHF station. There's a station in my area running more than 3000 kW for their analog transmitter. Also, those values are radiated power and don't take into account inefficiency in the transmitter, add at least another 30% to get closer to actual power consumption.
only a handful have chosen to re-claim their VHF spot after the changeover
Why the hell wouldn't stations move back to their VHF spot (assuming they had one) as quickly as possible? All the stations near me are moving their digital signals back to VHF because UHF transmitters suck down power like it's free. For example, there's a station near me running 900kW on their digital UHF transmitter. After switching to VHF, they'll be getting better coverage with only 30kW. It seems like pretty poor business sense to me to run UHF if you don't have to.
Oh and the shelby has 150mile range just so you know.
His mention of range was to point out that it's ridiculous to have a 1,000 HP motor when actually using all 1,000 HP would drain the batteries so fast you'd never get anywhere. Of course it would go farther if you only used a tiny fraction of the motor's capability, which is almost certainly what the 150 mi value is based on.
Slashdot Mirror
You're vastly overestimating analog radio. AM tops out at around 10kHz bandwidth, but it's so noisy you're never going to hear most of it. FM tops out around 15kHz, with higher frequencies rolling off sharply to protect the stereo pilot tone at 19kHz. Of course digital formats will slaughter high frequencies as well, but analog really doesn't have it so great.
Right now, the FM digital setups provide about 100kbps of total bandwidth (numbers vary with configuration), with the option to expand that more if you're willing to start encroaching on any high frequency analog subcarriers you might have. A lot of setups won't even use all 100kbps by default unless you manually change things around to fill it out. I'm sure a lot of stations that run only one audio stream are only at around 50kbps and don't even know it.
Sound quality is surprisingly good for such low bandwidth, but I wouldn't go so far as to describe it as CD quality. The real benefit in my opinion is getting rid of all the random noise. That's much more apparent on AM than FM, but even when I switch from a digital FM station to analog the first thing I always notice is how noisy it is.
The real advantage for broadcasters is that networks can now bring more of their services to a particular market without buying more transmitters or trying to get a license to build new ones. The little independent stations who broadcast standalone aren't going to pick up that many listeners, but networks duplicating already existing services and bringing them to new cities might be able to pick up a lot more ears when you look at things on a network wide basis. It remains to be seen, but I think multicasting has a lot of potential.
I suspect that you're right about wireless internet eventually taking over, but we aren't even close to being there yet. Right now a single AM station can cover several states, and reach millions of people. Try serving a few million people with individual audio streams at 64kbps. The bandwidth adds up fast, and our cellular networks are already performing pretty dismally under the relatively light load they have now (at least in my area). Until telcos get their asses in gear and build out their networks (yeah, right) radio is going to remain a much cheaper way to bring audio to all the people stuck in rush hour traffic every weekday.
I wasn't suggesting that analog radio was going away. I don't know about the status of all digital HD either, but there isn't anybody even beginning to think about it yet.
As far as I know there aren't any other digital audio formats approved for use in the sidebands. Actually, nothing I know of period is approved for the sidebands. The things you're thinking of are subcarriers on the analog signal, which for the most part don't require explicit approval. FMeXtra is one of those subcarrier formats. It's not a bad idea, except for the fact that a lot of stations already have a pretty full subcarrier load that they'd have to completely wipe out to implement it.
You're right, we could see a subcarrier format rise up to compete with it. Hell, HD radio and a subcarrier format could actually both be used at the same time. We could also see another sideband format come in to play, but I highly doubt the FCC would ever approve another one. They did learn a little something from crap like AM-stereo.
Radio really needed some kind of boost to prove that it could still be revelant, and I think it's sad that things have gone this way. Like it or not, digital radio means ibiquity HD radio now.
If you think DTV is bad, you should check out HD Radio. Rather than use one of several much more open standards available to them, the FCC requires that digital radio be in ibiquity's crappy format.
Want to transmit in digital? You need to use ibiquity's software, there is no other option. Oh, and you owe them a few grand per year per transmitter as well. Building a receiver? You get the decoder chips from them, and pay them fees. I hear they've finally let some other companies start building chips since they've been too inept to make one that will work in a portable device.
It's too bad, I think digital radio could be pretty valuable as far as keeping radio relevant, but the FCC decided to screw everyone instead.
Unless you focused on buying power saving components or a particularly efficient power supply, it wouldn't be totally unreasonable to assume about 100W for a desktop PC at idle. This wall wart computer probably pulls down about 5W when idle. The specifications page for the product lists 19W as the capacity of the power supply and I'm sure it's rated for more than it will ever need. An external USB drive with a script that powers it down after it isn't used for a period of time probably isn't going to add much more, figure 10W for the wall wart server and drive just as a nice round number.
Keeping them both on 24/7, the desktop will suck down 72 kWh per month, and the wall wart 7.2 kWh. Depending on your electric rates, that could be the difference between $100/yr for the desktop and $10/yr for the wall wart.
At speed it happens that the pitch angle is very small -- too small to notice -- but it's there. It has to be. Yes, I'm a private pilot. You could make a Bernoulli wing to accomplish the same thing, but then it would interfere at other angles of attack. In particular, a pronounced hump on the top of the wing would make the wing more prone to airflow separation and stalling.
Sorry, but that's simply untrue. A "Bernoulli wing" (normally referred to as a cambered wing) will produce lift at zero and even negative angles of attack. They aren't in any way more prone to stalling, and are almost universally used on modern aircraft. Modern computer simulation has produced wing sections that have dramatically increased lift/drag ratios and reduced separation compared to symmetric sections.
Bernoulli's effect is nothing more than conservation of energy. You can see it's effects on any surface that produces lift, no matter if it's cambered, symmetrical, or just a flat plate. Conservation of energy demands that when air is in the high pressure region under a wing it slows down. Air in the low pressure region above the wing speeds up. It's a simple exercise to prove that these high and low pressure regions exist with a wing section in a wind tunnel. Add a hot-wire anemometer to the wind tunnel and you can see the speed changes as well. I've done several such experiments myself.
A few disclaimers apply, this only works at mach numbers below about 0.3 Above that airflows start to show the effects of compression. It also only works outside the wing's boundary layer, where viscous effects dominate. Air under mach 0.3 and away from a surface can be treated as incompressible and inviscid. Bernoulli effect only applies in inviscid and incompressible flows.
Yes, I'm a pilot. I also have a degree in aerospace engineering.
I hate to reply to myself, but I just noticed that my previous post was very ambiguous. I was saying that everyone used openoffice. I was trying to imply that special education discounts of Microsoft office were still too expensive. The professors changing to .doc as the default format was specifically done for compatibility with openoffice. (I guess it was for office 2003 as well, but all the students I knew using microsoft office just pirated the new version anyway.)
Just about every engineering student I went to college with was using it. Mostly because even the discounted $45 version we had access to was just too much money for something that didn't get used except to type reports and occasionally make a graph in excel. When office 2007 came out and professors started sending out .docx files to students that could no longer read them, there was so much bitching from the student community that all the professors had the default file format set back to the old .doc format by the end of the week.
While I don't fundamentally disagree with anything you just said, it's really not as big an issue as you're making it out to be.
/dev/sda,b,c,d.. etc? This problem has been solved for years, and I'm surprised by how often it still comes up. Just identify partitions by UUID, and never have device names screw up a boot again.
You want to just take a drive out, throw it in a system and have it work? You can install the bootloader on multiple drives pretty easily. Whatever drive is the first boot device in BIOS is the one that gets used. Worried about getting the wrong
Is it an optimal situation? Hell no. It's probably what we're stuck with for the foreseeable future though, and it isn't terribly hard to work around the specific issue that you're complaining about.
I'm not sure where you've gotten the idea that there's a no fly zone around NYC, because there isn't one. There's plenty of uncontrolled airspace above the Hudson, and lots of helicopters fly up the river without even needing to contact air traffic control. The only city that has a permanent no fly zone above it is Washington DC.
When we see a bag someone has left on a bench, we have to evacuate 4 square miles and call in the bomb squad.
This reminds me of a story I saw awhile back in the paper. A "strange object" was found near the courthouse, and the bomb squad was called in. Once the bomb squad arrived, it was determined that the object was a float from a toilet tank. Thank god they were there to protect the populous from errant toilet parts.
-Requiring high altitudes for all planes, military or civilian
I think these are in place. Last time I saw a flight map for a city, there were huge no fly circles around it. I'm not a pilot but I think that's been around for a while.
Unless that city was Washington DC, you're interpreting that map wrong. No-fly zones, officially called prohibited airspace, are not very common and when present are usually quite small. You were probably looking at class B or C airspace, which is open to flight to all aircraft, as long as they are in contact with air traffic control.
The applicable regulations for minimum altitude (paraphrased, I don't have them memorized) basically say that in sparsely populated areas, you must have 500 ft of separation from any person, building, vehicle, or structure. In heavily populated areas you must have enough altitude for a safe emergency landing in the event of engine failure. That's basically all the guidance pilots get in terms of official regulations.
Mount Vesuvius is still considered active, and it isn't all that far south. Historically, multiple areas further north were volcanically active as well.
On the other hand, it's a guarantee that when they step into "the real world" they're going to have to deal with jerks, liars, and blowhards.
Hmm. First of all, how often does it come up? I'm pretty sure I live in the real world and in my experience it's pretty rare.
Okay, I usually stay out of arguments like this, but are you serious? Are you self employed, or only work in a very small business? If you find yourself in a situation where you can pick and choose who you interact with or only superficially interact with people on a short term basis, I can understand how you could come to this conclusion. I work in a midsize business, in a department where I have to deal with every other department. The vast majority of the people I work with are good people, but at least once a day I'm forced to deal with an asshole, a liar, or someone trying to bully me into getting their way. Everybody will inevitably come up against people like this in their lives at some point, and you'd better know how to stand up for yourself and work around them.
On the off chance that you work for a large business where everybody in the entire organization is great and has no personality flaws, let me know so I can come work there and never have to deal with jerks again. I highly doubt such an organization exists, but it's nice to think about.
Well, some of the larger 747 models have a maximum takeoff weight of over 900,000 pounds. I wouldn't expect ballistic recovery systems for them just yet.
You don't have to spend a lot of time on driver training. Just make the driver test somewhat harder, and make it necessary to retake every three years for everyone under 40, and two years for everyone over 40, to retain their driver license. (I choose those numbers because that's what you have to do to retain your pilot certification.)
Just a nitpick, but that's the interval that third class medicals expire at. All pilots need a flight review every two years to stay current.
The resulting explosive decompression tore off a large section of the roof
Whoever wrote that has no idea what kind of forces are involved. Here's what really happened.
A crack opened up, the resulting "explosive" decompression bent some of the outer skin upwards, through the boundry layer and into the airstream proper. Aircraft are constructed with a semi-monocoque design in which the skin carries a large portion of the forces involved. The crack severely weakened the skin, and the drag force from the edge of the crack being forced into the airflow pealed the skin of the aircraft back until it finally broke and separated entirely.
This left the aircraft flying at full speed with a rather large hole in the fuselage. The airflow over that hole would have become extremely turbulent. It'd be like being inside a giant pipe organ where the air is coming in at four hundred miles per hour. This extremely strong airflow is what tossed the stewardess out, and threw debris around and injured the passengers. Decompression had nothing to do with it other than the initial bending of the skin. If the break were at a place where the skin were more reinforced, none of the injuries would have happened. Sudden decompression would move light objects around, and would probably give your ears a nasty pop, but nobody is going to get sucked out just from that alone.
Yes, I am an aerospace engineer.
I have one python developer that has to turn off one core of his laptop to make his scripts run!
Excuse my software development ignorance, but how the hell is he doing that? Breaking his code on multiple processors, I mean.
You realize that your source for the US lists the federal tax separately, right? Federal tax adds another $.18 per gallon to the state values listed. Many states allow local taxes and fees to be added as well. It's pretty common to be paying at least $.40 per gallon.
I know you've been posting this all over the place, but I don't see how what he said is wrong. You're still going to have to emit a signal of some sort, and that signal is still going to take up part of the available spectrum. You may be able to reduce information that would otherwise have to be modulated in a conventional way, thus reducing the sidebands, thus reducing interference to adjacent channels. If you could get this to the point that you don't have to use conventional modulation at all, then the sidebands would get incredibly small, but the carrier would still be there.
Yes, these were in what would be considered low earth orbit. How much of a problem this is going to be depends on how many other objects are in nearby orbits that may collide with part of this cloud. The thing about atmospheric drag is that the atmosphere isn't really all that uniform. How a chunk of wrecked satellite with an unknown shape and size is going to react can be predicted, but only to a certain extent. Yes, everything will eventually fall down, even the stuff in a "higher orbit." Those orbits were just made more elliptical, and will eventually come down to about the same altitude the collision happened at. It's going to take awhile though, and those pieces that are too small to track are going to spread over wider and wider areas until they finally reenter. People will be furiously calculating probabilities of collisions for a long time. Decaying 'quickly' is relative I guess, while there is drag to bring them down, pieces will still be up there for years.
That's a question you'd have to answer by looking at FCC filings for the stations in your area because every area will be different. Every change to their transmission, like power increases, requires an updated filing so you can be sure that if a station changes anything, they'll do it all at once. As far as current power levels, many stations are moving digital to an old analog frequency after the change, others may increase power a bit, some are already running the exact digital configuration they'll use post transition. Every station's situation is different.
In my area, one station has been at 100% digital power for a long time. When they switch, they'll just turn off the analog transmitter. Every other station here is moving their digital signal into their old analog frequency, resulting in massive power reductions for them. Of course the changes in how VHF propagates compared to UHF means they'll actually have better digital signal than they do now, even with the massively reduced power.
I'd check a site like tvfool.com to check out what plans for the stations in your area are pre and post-transition.
50 kW is a tiny TV transmitter. Try 1000-1500 kW for a more realistic value for an analog UHF station, 300+ kW for an analog VHF station. There's a station in my area running more than 3000 kW for their analog transmitter. Also, those values are radiated power and don't take into account inefficiency in the transmitter, add at least another 30% to get closer to actual power consumption.
only a handful have chosen to re-claim their VHF spot after the changeover
Why the hell wouldn't stations move back to their VHF spot (assuming they had one) as quickly as possible? All the stations near me are moving their digital signals back to VHF because UHF transmitters suck down power like it's free. For example, there's a station near me running 900kW on their digital UHF transmitter. After switching to VHF, they'll be getting better coverage with only 30kW. It seems like pretty poor business sense to me to run UHF if you don't have to.
Oh and the shelby has 150mile range just so you know.
His mention of range was to point out that it's ridiculous to have a 1,000 HP motor when actually using all 1,000 HP would drain the batteries so fast you'd never get anywhere. Of course it would go farther if you only used a tiny fraction of the motor's capability, which is almost certainly what the 150 mi value is based on.