Australia TV goes all digital

[dr.ido]

Australia was PAL B/G, until the 13th of December when the last (as far as I know) analog transmitters switched off in Melbourne (and possibly other places I'm not aware of). Other areas switched off earlier. Now we are DVB-T with unencrypted MPEG2, though there are already plans to change this to encrypted MPEG4.

Here the low power community station (RMITV on channel 31) actually went digital only before the commercial and national stations.

I had planned to put up a video, but others on youtube did a far better job than I could have. I had been too busy at work to get other sets out of storage so I had to make do with what I had on hand.

The (bad) picture attached shows a few of the sets I had on hand tuned to 4 of the 5 analog broadcasts remaining on air a few hours before the switch off. I had expected the switch off to take place at midnight, but it was at 9 am the following morning. I watched it live on the the sets pictured, but didn't have time to set up the camera.

It probably isn't readable in the picture, but channels 7 and 10 were running text on the bottom of the screen warning of the impending switch off permanently in the week prior.

Channels 9 (on the AWA B&W set) and 10 (on the Toshiba 14") switched off 1st in the middle of a commercial, channel 7 (on the 10" Thorn AWA) played a collection of vintage clips before switching off. Channels 2 and 28 (one of which was on the 10" NEC LCD) lingered on a little longer, but did nothing to signify the switch off.