Posted on 04/26/2009 5:24:48 AM PDT by Las Vegas Dave
The lowly TV antenna is making a comeback, and bringing free TV along with it.
Sales of over-the-air TV antennas jumped last year thanks to the digital TV transition, as users upgrade their gear for better reception.
At the same time, some consumers looking to save money in today's economy are dumping cable and satellite pay TV services in favor of free broadcast television.
Makers of antennas, as well as local broadcasters, hope to drive more viewers to free television by touting its merits.
Besides being free, broadcast television offers the best high-definition picture quality, because it's uncompressed. Cable and satellite operators compress their HD channels in order to squeeze in more channels on their bandwidth, which degrades their quality.
Plus, most local broadcasters are now multicasting, with each providing up to six extra subchannels for viewers to enjoy.
Even if they can't persuade pay TV customers to switch to broadcast-only, antenna makers and broadcasters hope to get them to at least use antennas on secondary televisions in the home. Once households experience free TV, they might be willing to make the switch at some point, people in the industry say.
"We're seeing a huge uptick" in TV antenna sales, said Lou Lenzi, senior vice president of product management for Audiovox 's (VOXX) antenna manufacturing unit. "Some of our customers are reporting anywhere from a 50% to 100% increase in sales over the past 12 months."
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"A lot of people are rethinking spending $50 to $100 a month on pay TV," said Grant Whipple, national sales manager for antenna manufacturer Winegard, of Burlington, Iowa. "People are talking about not going out to eat or cutting out this or that, but I can save a lot of people well over $1,000 a year by putting up an antenna."
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
A knowledgeable friend (in the business of building DTV facilities) says that hi-V (channels 6-13) is exceptionally good for ATSC transmission.
He’s never mentioned having to put in a new antenna for ATSC to replace one that served for NTSC on the same channel.
(Of course there are other reasons to replace a broadcast antenna, but switching to ATSC on the same channel does not seem to be one of them.)
To clarify a couple of things—
My friend’s experience is that the calculated power levels allotted to ATSC transmissions are resulting in about the same overall coverage as the former NTSC transmissions from the same channels.
ATSC transmitters, in fact, run at about a tenth of the output power of their NTSC antecedents.
Finally, the frequencies used by the HDTV signals are in the same band and using the same channels, with the same channel widths, as the former NTSC signals.
With the exception of the very highest channels—61 and up, IIRC—which are being vacated so the FCC can sell them to other services for “billions of dot-com dollars.”
To clarify a couple more things—
Calling the DTV data stream protected by “checksum” is a gross oversimplification.
The stream actually contains a substantial fraction of redundancy information that allows the receiver to recover from many dropouts to produce an error-free stream to the rendering circuitry. The encoding system also has ways of concealing or reducing the visibility of errors that it cannot fully correct.
When you start to see specklies and black blocks, the signal is pretty degraded and the bit error rate is very high.
The digital receiver also has methods of compensating for the interfrence caused by multipath propagation. It can cancel (actually, autocorrelate) signals with path length differences of several miles, by my calculation.
≤};^)
I cancelled cable ten years ago. Haven’t missed it.
hehehe
Yeah, I’m loving RTN....One of my favorite channels (although now that baseball has started, there’s not much of a need for a favorite channel, but i digress). Rockford Files at 10PM EST...WOOOHOOOO....
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