This is false. I have no idea where this is coming from. There are about 20 PBS stations that sold spectrum in the 2016-2017 auction the FCC held to channel share, and considering there are hundreds of PBS stations out there, it's certainly not "most." And among those, most are not "renting" from commercial licensees.
The complete list of such stations and what they're doing follows:
KOCE Los Angeles, CA - shares on KSCI (commercial; no programming was lost) KLCS Los Angeles, CA - shares on KCET (non-commercial) KQEH San Jose, CA - shares on KQED (its PBS sister station, which was already airing its programming) WEDY New Haven, CT - shares on WEDH (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast) WXEL West Palm Beach, FL - shares on WPBT (its PBS sister station) WUSF Tampa, FL - shares on PBS WEDU and sold the license to them WYCC Chicago, IL - shares on PBS WTTW and sold the license to them WCMZ Flint, MI - went off the air entirely; PBS remains on WTVS/WDCQ WNJN Montclair, NJ - shares on WNJB (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast; no programming was lost) WNJT Trenton, NJ - shares on WNJS (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast; no programming was lost) WPBO Portsmouth, OH - went off the air entirely; PBS remains on WOSU/WKAS/etc. WLVT Allentown, PA - shares on WBPH (commercial; no programming was lost) WYBE Philadelphia, PA - shares on WBPH (commercial) and sold the license to WLVT WVIA Scranton, PA - shares on WNEP (commercial; no programming was lost) WRET Spartanburg, SC - shares on WNTV (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast; no programming was lost) WVPY Front Royal, VA - shares on WVPT (its PBS sister station) WMSY Marion, VA - station was already off the air for financial reasons WSBN Norton, VA - station was already off the air for financial reasons WVTA Windsor, VT - station will share on WVER, its PBS sister station of which it is a 100% simulcast, and will refill lost coverage with booster signals that are being built right now WMVT Milwaukee, WI - shares on WMVS (its PBS sister station)
The vast majority of the above did not have any change in resolution. To the extent there's a change in bandwidth, newer encoders have better performance, and you cannot measure picture quality from bandwidth alone.
I was wondering when someone else would notice this and point it out. If it had been an actual hostage situation, in which the suspect's sibling was present, why would you not at least verify the identity of the person before you start shooting? Guy possibly sends a hostage out and the police shoot the hostage? At least the hostage-taker wants the people to stay alive! What exactly did the police want?
This article spends almost its entire length going on and on about things like alternative medicine, but almost nothing about the actual resolution of back pain, except with respect to children (which, the article acknowledges, is not something all chiropractors endorse).
I don't buy into any of the nonsense, and my chiropractor doesn't either, but he uses the Impulse tool which doesn't hurt when it makes adjustments and I leave feeling much better than when I arrived. Before making any adjustment, he massages the back muscle to loosen it up and prevent damage. He's given me exercises to strengthen my back muscles to help keep things in alignment--and they work to the point that I go back about once per year when I do something really stupid and throw something completely out of alignment. He specifically said in my first appointment that if I'm coming back twice a week for years, he's not done his job properly.
Several years ago when I popped my scapula out of place while stretching and pinched a nerve (8-9 on the pain scale, didn't sleep a wink that night), the chiropractor put it back in place and the sharp stab instantly became a dull ache that went away after a few days.
I fully accept the idea that there are con artists out there who do the things mentioned in this article. I do not accept that it is universal or that chiropractors are incapable of providing any benefit whatsoever.
As someone else who hails from rural Virginia, there are plenty of roads that have no painted lines whatsoever, at the edge or in the center. And yes, it's easy to get to 65 MPH on them once you're familiar with them and know where the sharp curves are. Lack of lines doesn't change that.
"Switching that to compiled code won't get you much of a speedup."
Holy crap, is it bad that I've read so much about systemD feature creep that I initially read that word as "compileD" (as in a built-in compiler)? And worse, I attempted to go to Google to make sure I wasn't crazy?
Analog power was measured as peak power while digital power is measured as average power. If you measured analog power in average, that 100 kW would become about 25 kW (less than the 45 kW ceiling). A similar difference arises between 316 kW becoming about 80 kW (less than the 160 kW ceiling). On UHF, the power difference is 5000 kW for analog versus about 1250 kW for digital, slightly more than the 1000 kW ceiling, but only by about 1 dB.
On top of that, about 50 dB SNR was needed for a clear picture with an analog signal, while a digital signal requires only 16 dB for a perfect decode. So the difference in required SNR is more than 30 dB, but the power change, even if it actually was 5000 kW to 1000 kW, is only 7 dB.
Analog power was measured as peak power while digital power is measured as average power. If you measured analog power in RMS, that 100 kW would become about 25 kW (less than the 45 kW ceiling). A similar difference arises between 316 kW becoming about 80 kW (less than the 160 kW ceiling). On UHF, the power difference is 5000 kW for analog versus about 1250 kW for digital, slightly more than the 1000 kW ceiling, but only by about 1 dB.
On top of that, about 50 dB SNR was needed for a clear picture with an analog signal, while a digital signal requires only 16 dB for a perfect decode. So the difference in required SNR is more than 30 dB, but the power change, even if it actually was 5000 kW to 1000 kW, is only 7 dB.
FCC rules only allow for stations in the DMA to be provided, but the stations and DMAs are actually assigned by Nielsen. Don't ask me, I think it's stupid too. In certain, select cases, the FCC has overridden Nielsen and assigned certain stations to other markets, for example where a station can't compete in the market it's located in due to poor coverage of that market, but as a general rule, it's up to Nielsen who is assigned where.
So are you in New Hampshire but in the Portland or Burlington DMA then? The law was changed not too long ago to require the carriage of statewide PBS networks for all customers in a state, but if they don't carry a good news or affairs type program, that doesn't really help. And, of course, NHPTV is now run out of the WGBH studios anyway.
Sounds like you're in that part of southern Vermont that's part of the Boston market. Am I in the right ballpark?
In your case, you're right. There was a time, probably in or before the 1970's, when people either invested in huge antennas to get what they could get or invested in CATV, but those people watched Boston, and thus that area is now considered to be in the Boston DMA. In fact, that area used to have a full-power repeater station, WRLP-32, which rebroadcasted the signal of WWLP-22 in Springfield, MA. But everyone watched Boston, they made no money on it, and they shut it down in 1978. And so now it's almost impossible to get more than one or two stations in that area. (I think WEKW in Keene, NH might be doable for PBS without too huge an investment, depending on specific location, but that's basically it.)
Many other rural areas do still have translators, like rural Utah and much of the west. Even in urban areas, I've spoken with plenty of people who either don't know OTA TV exists anymore, or who assume it won't work for them, and in large part it's because of buying crap equipment that's sold at Walmart.
(For the record, the FCC does not assign the DMAs, private company Nielsen does. There are many people, myself included, who hate this and wish it was done differently. I need to write a white paper about the market ranking and assignment system I use on my website, and then see if I can get the FCC to adopt it.)
Very large parts? There are definitely areas that don't, particularly in Alaska, but I would argue that more than 99% of the population has access to OTA HD signals. But, those people have to invest in the right equipment to do so and not expect to plug in an antenna that would be outperformed by a paper clip and still get good reception. (Misinformation from the Walmarts of the world is responsible for a lot of that.)
Disclaimer: I work for the FCC on matters of OTA digital TV signal propagation and interference. I also run a website about OTA TV.
If you're that close and over flat terrain, you likely don't need something 25 feet up. You probably just need something in the attic or, possibly, attached to the side of the house, and the FCC overrides local government laws and HOA requirements for those. Search for "OTARD" on your favorite search engine. Feel free to contact me via the contact info on my website if you want more information on that or on local station availability or antenna recommendations.
MPEG-2 is compressed by definition; an uncompressed HD picture is something like 1 Gbps. Confetti, for example, looks awful no matter what the source, because it's hard to compress.
The only reason MPEG-4 isn't supported in ATSC is because it didn't exist when the standard was written! MPEG-4 is actually now in ATSC, but is not a required part, so no receivers support it and no broadcasters use it except in rare corner cases.
And it's only 18.2 Mbps if there are no other services on the OTA channel; some stations in smaller markets now cram 3 HD services into the 19.393 Mbps channel, which is an average of about 6 Mbps per video channel when you take into account audio and overhead. Most other stations run at least one SD channel in addition to the HD channel, many run more than one. Others are doing Mobile DTV which eats into the bandwidth available. The bitrate of a single HD feed averaged across all OTA stations in the US and Canada is something in the neighborhood of 13 Mbps in MPEG-2.
Obligatory disclaimer: I used to work for a broadcast TV company heading up our broadcast TV engineering projects. I now work for the FCC on over-the-air digital TV matters. In my spare time, I run digital TV website RabbitEars.Info.
When spectrum is unlicensed, it can be used for both commercial and non-commercial uses. My ISP operates its end-user links on 900 MHz unlicensed spectrum, but its backhauls are on highly-directional 2.4 GHz unlicensed links. That, of course, does not mean that 2.4 GHz cannot also be used for wifi in the home, or that 900 MHz cannot also be used for cordless phones. (In fact, I had to replace one of my cordless phones when I got my Internet connection because the two would interfere badly. If the phone was on the exact same frequency as the Internet, it'd knock the Internet out, but if it was merely adjacent, I would hear modem sounds on the phone.)
Who will pay for the new MPEG-4 boxes? Will the government be sponsoring another converter box coupon program?
The Mobile DTV standard is not designed for HDTV, and vice versa. The ATSC-MH standard takes about 1.8 Mbps on the standard ATSC side and adds so much error correction that you only get about 0.3 Mbps on the other side. Chopping a whole 19 Mbps channel down to 3 Mbps leaves almost no room even with MPEG-4.
Cellular architecture does not work with ATSC at all, except in severely terrain-shielded situations.
You're assuming, of course, that the stations are not making full use of their bandwidth NOW. Which many are. And you're assuming that the FCC isn't biased. They recently had a broadcasters summit where they analyzed and concluded that the FCC paper is a pipedream that would not work out in the real world where we all live and work. So, the FCC chose to ignore their own summit.
Wow, that's good to know. I guess I'm only imagining that my line speed is still at 26.4k or my friend on a larger nearby road still gets 14.4k. Wonderful upgrade there, Verizon! Glad to know you didn't pocket it and screw me over.
Point made, poor phrasing on my part. Multicast does exist, don't get me wrong, but good luck getting any major ISPs in the US to support it. Remember they're all offering their own subscription video services--do you really think they'll let just anyone multicast video over "their" network without getting a cut?
It's an effective "cannot" rather than a physical "cannot."
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I assume you mean AT&T. Sprint is the one suing AT&T for rebranding their LTE as "5G E".
This is false. I have no idea where this is coming from. There are about 20 PBS stations that sold spectrum in the 2016-2017 auction the FCC held to channel share, and considering there are hundreds of PBS stations out there, it's certainly not "most." And among those, most are not "renting" from commercial licensees.
The complete list of such stations and what they're doing follows:
KOCE Los Angeles, CA - shares on KSCI (commercial; no programming was lost)
KLCS Los Angeles, CA - shares on KCET (non-commercial)
KQEH San Jose, CA - shares on KQED (its PBS sister station, which was already airing its programming)
WEDY New Haven, CT - shares on WEDH (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast)
WXEL West Palm Beach, FL - shares on WPBT (its PBS sister station)
WUSF Tampa, FL - shares on PBS WEDU and sold the license to them
WYCC Chicago, IL - shares on PBS WTTW and sold the license to them
WCMZ Flint, MI - went off the air entirely; PBS remains on WTVS/WDCQ
WNJN Montclair, NJ - shares on WNJB (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast; no programming was lost)
WNJT Trenton, NJ - shares on WNJS (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast; no programming was lost)
WPBO Portsmouth, OH - went off the air entirely; PBS remains on WOSU/WKAS/etc.
WLVT Allentown, PA - shares on WBPH (commercial; no programming was lost)
WYBE Philadelphia, PA - shares on WBPH (commercial) and sold the license to WLVT
WVIA Scranton, PA - shares on WNEP (commercial; no programming was lost)
WRET Spartanburg, SC - shares on WNTV (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast; no programming was lost)
WVPY Front Royal, VA - shares on WVPT (its PBS sister station)
WMSY Marion, VA - station was already off the air for financial reasons
WSBN Norton, VA - station was already off the air for financial reasons
WVTA Windsor, VT - station will share on WVER, its PBS sister station of which it is a 100% simulcast, and will refill lost coverage with booster signals that are being built right now
WMVT Milwaukee, WI - shares on WMVS (its PBS sister station)
The vast majority of the above did not have any change in resolution. To the extent there's a change in bandwidth, newer encoders have better performance, and you cannot measure picture quality from bandwidth alone.
If you haven't, you should read the text of the lawsuit that Tribune filed against Sinclair. I can only wonder what they were thinking.
http://www.tribunemedia.com/wp...
I was wondering when someone else would notice this and point it out. If it had been an actual hostage situation, in which the suspect's sibling was present, why would you not at least verify the identity of the person before you start shooting? Guy possibly sends a hostage out and the police shoot the hostage? At least the hostage-taker wants the people to stay alive! What exactly did the police want?
This article spends almost its entire length going on and on about things like alternative medicine, but almost nothing about the actual resolution of back pain, except with respect to children (which, the article acknowledges, is not something all chiropractors endorse).
I don't buy into any of the nonsense, and my chiropractor doesn't either, but he uses the Impulse tool which doesn't hurt when it makes adjustments and I leave feeling much better than when I arrived. Before making any adjustment, he massages the back muscle to loosen it up and prevent damage. He's given me exercises to strengthen my back muscles to help keep things in alignment--and they work to the point that I go back about once per year when I do something really stupid and throw something completely out of alignment. He specifically said in my first appointment that if I'm coming back twice a week for years, he's not done his job properly.
Several years ago when I popped my scapula out of place while stretching and pinched a nerve (8-9 on the pain scale, didn't sleep a wink that night), the chiropractor put it back in place and the sharp stab instantly became a dull ache that went away after a few days.
I fully accept the idea that there are con artists out there who do the things mentioned in this article. I do not accept that it is universal or that chiropractors are incapable of providing any benefit whatsoever.
Good to know they think they're a common carrier. This should make future regulations putting them under such regulations stick more easily.
As someone else who hails from rural Virginia, there are plenty of roads that have no painted lines whatsoever, at the edge or in the center. And yes, it's easy to get to 65 MPH on them once you're familiar with them and know where the sharp curves are. Lack of lines doesn't change that.
You mean like this?
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/201...
"Switching that to compiled code won't get you much of a speedup."
Holy crap, is it bad that I've read so much about systemD feature creep that I initially read that word as "compileD" (as in a built-in compiler)? And worse, I attempted to go to Google to make sure I wasn't crazy?
I meant "average" and not "RMS" in my second sentence. Wish I could edit...
Analog power was measured as peak power while digital power is measured as average power. If you measured analog power in average, that 100 kW would become about 25 kW (less than the 45 kW ceiling). A similar difference arises between 316 kW becoming about 80 kW (less than the 160 kW ceiling). On UHF, the power difference is 5000 kW for analog versus about 1250 kW for digital, slightly more than the 1000 kW ceiling, but only by about 1 dB.
On top of that, about 50 dB SNR was needed for a clear picture with an analog signal, while a digital signal requires only 16 dB for a perfect decode. So the difference in required SNR is more than 30 dB, but the power change, even if it actually was 5000 kW to 1000 kW, is only 7 dB.
Analog power was measured as peak power while digital power is measured as average power. If you measured analog power in RMS, that 100 kW would become about 25 kW (less than the 45 kW ceiling). A similar difference arises between 316 kW becoming about 80 kW (less than the 160 kW ceiling). On UHF, the power difference is 5000 kW for analog versus about 1250 kW for digital, slightly more than the 1000 kW ceiling, but only by about 1 dB.
On top of that, about 50 dB SNR was needed for a clear picture with an analog signal, while a digital signal requires only 16 dB for a perfect decode. So the difference in required SNR is more than 30 dB, but the power change, even if it actually was 5000 kW to 1000 kW, is only 7 dB.
Comments filed on the same day are listed in alphabetical order. They're sorted in order by date (not time) and then by name.
Comments filed on the same day are listed in alphabetical order. They're sorted in order by date (not time) and then by name.
FCC rules only allow for stations in the DMA to be provided, but the stations and DMAs are actually assigned by Nielsen. Don't ask me, I think it's stupid too. In certain, select cases, the FCC has overridden Nielsen and assigned certain stations to other markets, for example where a station can't compete in the market it's located in due to poor coverage of that market, but as a general rule, it's up to Nielsen who is assigned where.
So are you in New Hampshire but in the Portland or Burlington DMA then? The law was changed not too long ago to require the carriage of statewide PBS networks for all customers in a state, but if they don't carry a good news or affairs type program, that doesn't really help. And, of course, NHPTV is now run out of the WGBH studios anyway.
Sounds like you're in that part of southern Vermont that's part of the Boston market. Am I in the right ballpark?
In your case, you're right. There was a time, probably in or before the 1970's, when people either invested in huge antennas to get what they could get or invested in CATV, but those people watched Boston, and thus that area is now considered to be in the Boston DMA. In fact, that area used to have a full-power repeater station, WRLP-32, which rebroadcasted the signal of WWLP-22 in Springfield, MA. But everyone watched Boston, they made no money on it, and they shut it down in 1978. And so now it's almost impossible to get more than one or two stations in that area. (I think WEKW in Keene, NH might be doable for PBS without too huge an investment, depending on specific location, but that's basically it.)
Many other rural areas do still have translators, like rural Utah and much of the west. Even in urban areas, I've spoken with plenty of people who either don't know OTA TV exists anymore, or who assume it won't work for them, and in large part it's because of buying crap equipment that's sold at Walmart.
(For the record, the FCC does not assign the DMAs, private company Nielsen does. There are many people, myself included, who hate this and wish it was done differently. I need to write a white paper about the market ranking and assignment system I use on my website, and then see if I can get the FCC to adopt it.)
Very large parts? There are definitely areas that don't, particularly in Alaska, but I would argue that more than 99% of the population has access to OTA HD signals. But, those people have to invest in the right equipment to do so and not expect to plug in an antenna that would be outperformed by a paper clip and still get good reception. (Misinformation from the Walmarts of the world is responsible for a lot of that.)
Disclaimer: I work for the FCC on matters of OTA digital TV signal propagation and interference. I also run a website about OTA TV.
If you're that close and over flat terrain, you likely don't need something 25 feet up. You probably just need something in the attic or, possibly, attached to the side of the house, and the FCC overrides local government laws and HOA requirements for those. Search for "OTARD" on your favorite search engine. Feel free to contact me via the contact info on my website if you want more information on that or on local station availability or antenna recommendations.
MPEG-2 is compressed by definition; an uncompressed HD picture is something like 1 Gbps. Confetti, for example, looks awful no matter what the source, because it's hard to compress.
The only reason MPEG-4 isn't supported in ATSC is because it didn't exist when the standard was written! MPEG-4 is actually now in ATSC, but is not a required part, so no receivers support it and no broadcasters use it except in rare corner cases.
And it's only 18.2 Mbps if there are no other services on the OTA channel; some stations in smaller markets now cram 3 HD services into the 19.393 Mbps channel, which is an average of about 6 Mbps per video channel when you take into account audio and overhead. Most other stations run at least one SD channel in addition to the HD channel, many run more than one. Others are doing Mobile DTV which eats into the bandwidth available. The bitrate of a single HD feed averaged across all OTA stations in the US and Canada is something in the neighborhood of 13 Mbps in MPEG-2.
Obligatory disclaimer: I used to work for a broadcast TV company heading up our broadcast TV engineering projects. I now work for the FCC on over-the-air digital TV matters. In my spare time, I run digital TV website RabbitEars.Info.
When spectrum is unlicensed, it can be used for both commercial and non-commercial uses. My ISP operates its end-user links on 900 MHz unlicensed spectrum, but its backhauls are on highly-directional 2.4 GHz unlicensed links. That, of course, does not mean that 2.4 GHz cannot also be used for wifi in the home, or that 900 MHz cannot also be used for cordless phones. (In fact, I had to replace one of my cordless phones when I got my Internet connection because the two would interfere badly. If the phone was on the exact same frequency as the Internet, it'd knock the Internet out, but if it was merely adjacent, I would hear modem sounds on the phone.)
I wouldn't have expected Clear Channel to go along with it.
It was not an NAB event. Here's the FCC announcing that they were holding the event: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-298707A1.pdf
Who will pay for the new MPEG-4 boxes? Will the government be sponsoring another converter box coupon program?
The Mobile DTV standard is not designed for HDTV, and vice versa. The ATSC-MH standard takes about 1.8 Mbps on the standard ATSC side and adds so much error correction that you only get about 0.3 Mbps on the other side. Chopping a whole 19 Mbps channel down to 3 Mbps leaves almost no room even with MPEG-4.
Cellular architecture does not work with ATSC at all, except in severely terrain-shielded situations.
You're assuming, of course, that the stations are not making full use of their bandwidth NOW. Which many are. And you're assuming that the FCC isn't biased. They recently had a broadcasters summit where they analyzed and concluded that the FCC paper is a pipedream that would not work out in the real world where we all live and work. So, the FCC chose to ignore their own summit.
Wow, that's good to know. I guess I'm only imagining that my line speed is still at 26.4k or my friend on a larger nearby road still gets 14.4k. Wonderful upgrade there, Verizon! Glad to know you didn't pocket it and screw me over.
Point made, poor phrasing on my part. Multicast does exist, don't get me wrong, but good luck getting any major ISPs in the US to support it. Remember they're all offering their own subscription video services--do you really think they'll let just anyone multicast video over "their" network without getting a cut?
It's an effective "cannot" rather than a physical "cannot."