Just when we thought it was safe to surf our new digital televisions (DTVs), another, more subtle wave is washing over the shores of consumer electronics (CE). That wave is the new ATSC M/H mobile/handheld standard, dubbed A/153 by propellerheads. In the past, when analog TV still worked, you could purchase cheap, nasty little TVs the size of a paperback book. They had very low-res displays, barely functional tuners, and the worse sound imaginable. Did I mention they were cheap?
You may remember that last year all old school analog TV stations went off the air, to be replaced by their equivalent digital versions. These DTV channels are free, over the air broadcasts that require only a minimal investment to receive. I purchased one of the converter boxes that the gov’ment subsidized, and an indoor antenna for my problematic location in the sandy hills of western San Francisco. Now, with less than a $100 outlay, I get a huge number of local channels, for free! Whenever I visit relatives, I always wonder why they spend hilarious amounts of money on cable or satellite for 200 channels of home shopping and A-Team reruns. Heck, that’s what DVDs are for!
Anyway, back to those portable TVs…they’re dead. Not dead as in "won't work," it’s just they have nothing to display. As I mentioned earlier, with the exception of specialized LPTV or low power stations serving pocket–sized audiences, all analog television service in the US shut down the middle of last year. In Australia, it started this year and, in Canada, it’ll happen next year. Analog is expensive so, all around the world, analog TV is going the way of black and white, never to return.
If you’re one of those brave, or cheap, folks who, like me, have joined the great free TV bandwagon, you may have noticed that digital TV reception ain’t as easy to set up as analog. With old fashioned TV, you could pick up marginal stations, even though the picture may have been snowy or ghosted. That same station, in the shiny new digital version, is likely to be nonexistent, at least as far as your receiver is concerned. That’s because digital anything is a go/no go proposition. Either the bulk of the data arrives intact or you're SOL. “Nada, zip, no can do,” sez Mr. DTV receiver. So, stations with insufficient signal strength, rather than being noisy but serviceable, simply will not decode at all. The result; no picture or sound.
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