DTV station identification; are local TV stations still analog on digital cable?

[peverett]

I have no apology for the programming, but to hint that we are "bandwidth starved" when I see drivers blabbing on cellphones everyday is idiotic. Much of the non-TV uses for the bandwidth is just as stupid as the reality shows. It is a fact that most people get their severe weather info via TV. To me, the unreliability in severe weather is the big issue with DTV. I suspect that people will at some point be harmed due to the fact that they cannot now get reliable over-the-air weather information via TV. Having reliable weather information via TV is a much more valuable use of bandwidth than selling it to Verizon in my opinion.

Do not give me "Use the radio for weather info" excuse. Commercial radio is very poor at broadcasting severe weather info and the weather radios have issues(I have one). In any case the information carried via a picture is truly worth 1000 words in severe weather.

Now, if they truly get mobile DTV working reliably(even in severe weather), I could possibly change my mind.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by peverett

Do not give me "Use the radio for weather info" excuse. Commercial radio is very poor at broadcasting severe weather info and the weather radios have issues(I have one). In any case the information carried via a picture is truly worth 1000 words in severe weather.

Now, if they truly get mobile DTV working reliably(even in severe weather), I could possibly change my mind.

It's not an excuse. Radio was around decades before television, and weather radios that carry the weather bureau's forecasts do a decent job of alerting the public to severe weather or approaching storms (I'll say; many times weather radios sound off in the middle of the night or at all hours of the day--even when the disturbance is miles away from where the listener is located, which is why I don't use my 10-year-old Midland all-hazard FM/weather radio any longer). How did people got severe weather information before there was such a thing as television? Over the radio, of course.

Also, I cannot believe that local radio stations do not, ever, give severe weather information any longer. Radio stations must operate in the public interest, whether their programming is live, automated or whatever. "Operating in the public interest" means, among other things, that radio stations must provide severe weather information when needed, even if it means interrupting automated programming to do so, or by having the station engineer break in with bulletins. If they do not, they could (and will) be cited by the FCC and could lose their licenses. Commercial radio stations are businesses that depend on advertising revenue to stay on the air; therefore, they cannot afford to be off the air for any length of time. Therefore, you can be certain they will adhere to the letter of the law and will correct any problems as soon as they occur, or when pointed out by the FCC during an inspection of station logs. The big network O&O (owned and operated) stations would not dare be unprepared for severe weather events; the networks would not allow such a thing. However, smaller local-service stations have a responsibility as well to the community(ies) they serve (operating in the public interest, again), which means they must have, at very least, EAS (Emergency Alert System) equipment.

To be sure, the EAS has its flaws, but by and large it is better than Conelrad or the Emergency Broadcast System. The former silenced all but one key alert station in the affected area in the event of an emergency; if you were within listening range of the alert station during an emergency (and tuned your radio to 640 or 1240 when the announcer on the local station you were listening to declared an emergency condition, also informing listeners that this particular station would leave the air immediately and for listeners to tune to the designated Conelrad station in their local area), great, but if you were out of range of that signal and could not hear it, you were out of luck. The latter system (EBS) was an improvement over Conelrad as it, like the present-day EAS, broadcast emergency warnings over all stations in the affected area, not just one selected low-power station with very limited range.

In tornado-prone areas, for example, don't forget tornado warning sirens. These are supposed to sound as soon as the weather service spots a tornado anywhere in the area. I'm sure there are other, similar warning systems, supposedly (hopefully) fail-safe, for early warnings of earthquakes and other natural disasters in other parts of this country as well. Note that I said "hopefully" fail-safe. I said this because these systems do fail on occasion, and sirens often are not heard in the very areas where they need to be heard, such as rural areas where homes are often separated by miles, not feet. The early-warning system for natural disasters in this country absolutely must be upgraded, and soon (the sooner the better), so that no one is ever out of range of emergency sirens or warnings in the event of such an emergency, even if the person (people) involved is or are, literally, out in the middle of nowhere.

[peverett]

The issue with weather radios is not their accuracy, this is fine. From my experience it is the way the system is set up. On my weather radio(Midland, the only one sold in my area, as far as I can tell) you cannot disable the alarm when only a watch is present, i. e. it will go off every 30 minutes or so, even when no storms(no warnings) are present. Guess what, most people get tired of hearing this and disable the alarm, so the radio becomes useless.

I wrote the manufacturer and they indicated that the system is set up so that the watch/warning signals cannot be distinqushed by the radio-what a stupid system design flaw if true.

As far as sirens go, my mother lives in rural OK. She has no siren within 20 miles. There are two small towns of about 1000 people nearby, these also have no sirens. There are millions of people in the US living outside the range of sirens. In fact, I live in a suburb in Texas and have never heard a siren tested-I may not have one.

I, for one, have not heard commercial radio(I have the radio on all the time when driving) broadcast a weather warning in years. We have severe weather here every spring and fall. If they are violating laws, no one cares. This lack of weather information via commercial radio is what prompted my mobile TV comment-at least weather warnings would be available when on the road(Hopefully a passenger, not the driver is watching). There have been many times that I have been driving and wondered how bad the storm I saw ahead of me is-but no info came from the radio.

The fact remains ( ask anyone in tornado alley) that TV remains the main conduit of severe weather information to the average person. In my opinion, making this conduit less reliable mainly to sell public bandwidth to Verizon, etc. is criminal.

[3Guncolor]

As far as I know there is no rule that a station has to broadcast any weather warnings. It is in thier interest to do so but they need the staff to support it. As for the EAS system that is a different matter it would depend on the local EAS group and what they wanted monitored. Most stations only have to monitor the LP1 and LP2 station for thier area. As far as the EAS system it is more or less is a joke and I agree it's more or less useless. EBS or Conelrad were never ment for local alerts it was for Washington to tell us the world as we know it was ending. Infact the reason they set up Conelrad was to make it so the bombers would not be able to use our radio stations to home in on our cities.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by 3Guncolor

Jeffhs,
I can answer your question and any others you may want to know how we get and process the signals in the world of cable. Where I’m at this is what is taking place:
We still receive most of the stations over the air (8VSB) we switched from the analog versions late last year. (This is for the SD versions HD has always used their 8VSB version and today at my system we three versions on the system of most of the broadcast stations, SD analog plain old TV, the digital SD version for customers with SD only equipment and the HD version.) The 8VSB receiver converts the stations signal to a format called SDI that we feed into another encoder to make up our MUX for the 256QAM carrier with about 14 stations in it. This same data is used to feed what we call a digital to analog modulator that is pumping out NTSC RF that we have used for years. That is step that the digital to analog conversion takes place. We have been using these devices for several years since we went all digital. All digital just means if a customer has a digital box they are watching only our digital versions of each channel so they get a nice clean picture. One of the reasons this was done is to compete with dish and the telcos. The studio feeds we do get are digital and have been for many years. And yes there is another HD 8VSB receiver for the HD version and different processing too and a different 256 QAM carrier with 3 stations in it. We still have many analog channels and I expect we will have analog RF for several years until all the cable ready sets die. There customers that like not having a box on each set. BTW if a customer has a QAM HDTV the can receive our digital versions of the broadcasters both SD and HD we don’t scramble those channels.

I appreciate all the information, but do not understand the abbreviations you use, as I am nowhere near a television expert. For openers, what is "QAM"? The only thing QAM means to me at this point is a radio station in Miami which uses those letters as its call sign. "MUX"? Again, you lost me. "Eight-VSB"? Huh? "Two-hundred-fifty-six QAM"? You lost me a third time. Please remember that there are people reading these forums who are, like myself, not television experts (just because I am an amateur radio operator does not necessarily mean I know everything about TV technology) and know or care little, if anything, about what goes on behind the scenes at a television station, let alone at a cable headend.

If cable companies are waiting for consumers' cable-ready TVs to give up the ghost, they may be waiting quite a while, as there are far more analog TVs than flat-panels in use in the US at this time; some of the analog sets are only a few years old and still work well. Two examples: My own 1999-vintage RCA XL-100 CTC185 still makes a great picture and still has its original CRT; my 1995 Zenith Sentry 2 also works amazingly well after almost fourteen years. The latter is not currently in use, but it is in line to replace the RCA when it eventually goes belly-up, as I do not intend to have the RCA set repaired the next time it quits; the set is too old already and has been out of warranty for years (RCA tried for quite a while to interest me in an extended warranty for this TV--even after the set was seven or eight years old). The Zenith is fourteen years old, but has only had four years of actual use as it was my daily watcher at my former home; I bought the RCA new when I moved here nine years ago, putting the Zenith in storage in the bedroom, where the latter has been since then--I only use it for cross-checking when my cable goes out or acts up, so the Zenith has very low time on it.

My point is that people who, like myself, still have operating analog TVs will still be using analog RF cable service for some time to come, so the cable companies cannot afford to go truly all-digital any time soon--they will lose too many subscribers. Also, flat-panel sets made by reputable manufacturers are still far too expensive for many people to afford, although the cheaper ones made by offshore manufacturers, with names few people have ever heard of, can be had for under $200--and will poop out within two years. There's $200 or less (pardon the pun) down the tubes. I could get a Magnavox (Philips) FP tomorrow if I wanted a TV with a picture not much larger than an oversize postage stamp (the smaller the picture, the lower the price), but I'm waiting for Panasonic, Sony, et al. 19" sets to come down to around $200. I don't want or need anything bigger than 19" since I live in a very small apartment.

The reliability issue is a factor as well. I don't want a TV that will fail within two years. If and when the state of the art in HDTV reaches the point where the sets will last ten years or more without major breakdowns, I would consider getting one to replace my analog CRT set, but not one minute before.

I had digital cable, with a converter box, several years ago and liked it, but, living on a fixed income, I couldn't afford it for long, so I eventually downgraded to expanded basic analog. Then, when the economy soured, I found X-basic cable still too much of a bite out of my wallet so I downgraded again, to basic cable service--local channels only, plus a couple others such as C-SPAN, local news, WGN America (not WGN-TV 9 The CW in Chicago--there's a difference), and even a couple of X-basic channels the installer told me they couldn't remove from even basic service.

[3Guncolor]

Sorry about any confusion… 8VSB (8 level vestigial sideband modulation) is the modulation format that is used in the US for digital over the air television. This system can handle a digital payload of about 19 mega bits per second. As an example we have to use a 8VSB receiver at the headend to receive a television station. All televisions sold in the US have had to have a 8VSB tuner for several years now. QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) is the digital system used by most cable systems in the US. Most use 256 QAM that hold a useable digital payload of about 38 mega bits per second. Average HD channels take about 12 mega bits per second so we can fit about 3 channels into each RF channel. Each RF channel is still the same size 6 Mhz so they can share the same cable with analog channels. Standard definition channels are about 4 meg bit per second so we can fit about 12 to 14 channels in each RF channel on the system.

A lot of the digital sets also have tuner that can receive QAM so they are cable ready just like the old sets.

I expect we will start dropping analog channels over time to free up space for more digital HD channels. The fact of the matter is this change will be driven by cable needing to keep up with satellite and the telcos. It’s all about money. Yes there will be some unhappy customers but it really gets down to keeps as many customers happy as possible.
The last analog to go will be the standard broadcast lineup.

I am sad to see analog go but it had to happen it was time. But I have many old televisions including Zenith roundies and even have one in my office it’s on every day I’m there and works just fine being fed from a digital cable box. There is no way an average customer could keep these sets running they all need attention from time to time due to age. But I must say this happened yesterday one of my staff needed an analog monitor to test something at one of my hubs (distribution building that is fed from the headend) and went out to store room and pulled out a 12”Sony from about 1982 fired that puppy up and we couldn’t believe how good the picture was on that guy.

[peverett]

If DTV was reliable, I would not be sad to see analog go. We only have one VHF station in our area, so I would need some type of external tuner to watch more than one station anyway on my 50s TVs.

However, from my experience so far, the reliabilty of DTV, even in good weather, is much less than analog. The antenna must continually be tweaked and even then, drop outs(including sound drop outs) occur. In stormy weather, all bets are off. On one stormy day(pre-conversion), the DTV signal froze for 10 minutes, analog continued on just fine. (The antenna issues have continued, even with the conversion complete-I wrote one of the local stations that I have particular problems with asking about increasing power-they are not planning to-this station was fine in NTSC).

They say "get an outdoor antenna". However, indoor antennas worked just fine for analog over decades here. Why should the general public be putting up with this crap mainly so people like Verizon can make more money? I agree that freeing up some bandwidth for emerency services was probably necessary-but it is my understanding that 90 % of the released bandwidth went to Verizon, etc and not emergency services.

I do not agree that it "had to happen". It was done mainly by the phone company lobbyists touting their interests(and the Republicans listening-they passed it 51R-50D in 2005)over what I believe to be the best interest of the general public. I had hoped the Democrats being in power might at least get the law modified, but appearently they also have too much phone company money in their pocket.

[Einar72]

The HDTV hoax has reached or will reach into every American household at some point. Question is, why did we allow this? Politicians and foreign corporations knew we were suckers ripe for a plucking. We are draining jobs and money faster than we can handle and all the noise in the media steers us away from this fact. MelodyMaster, if you were feeding your kids from dumpster divings, would you still cheer this loss of industry to our adversaries? I can no longer find work in electronic manufacturing, despite the promise from an old fool in Washington back in the Michael Jackson era that "high-tech jobs are coming to replace the old manufacturing ones" Can you name him?

We are so vain and egocentric as a culture that we couldn't resist something that was newer, better, faster, shinier, more satisfying, etc. Far too many of us were willing to shut-up-and-eat-it.

There is plenty of garbage on TV for all too see in glorious HDTV, trouble is, nobody can articulate as to why we are better off with it. All I hear from its proponents is how we MUST have it or our ____ are gonna fall off.

BTW, I dare any manufacturer of set-top DTV converters to market one in kit form.

[Jeffhs]

I read the post by 3GunColor as to the future of DTV, i.e. which services will go digital when, and was amazed to read that analog over-the-air channels will be the last to be taken off the cable, being replaced by full digital--the only question is when. The cable companies cannot remove the broadcast channels from their systems, at least not yet, as there are far too many analog TVs out there; that is one reason Time Warner (and probably most other cable operators as well) offer a local channels only package, which is usually their lowest-priced tier of service. I live in an apartment building in an area of northeastern Ohio where rabbit ears did not work well at all for analog TV (I only got one analog channel well enough to watch here) and more than likely will not work, period, for digital; therefore, most if not all tenants in my building, myself included, and just about everywhere in this village (there are few if any antennas left on rooftops that I can see) have cable service, although someone here did have satellite service (with a huge dish; I don't think it was for TV, though) several years ago. Another tenant in an apartment building next to me also had Dish Network satellite until he or she moved (or got cable) a few months ago.

I hate to think what will happen to the folks with cable when the analog OTA signals now on all cable systems are replaced exclusively by digital ones. This will force (yes, force) people to either get a new flat-panel HDTV with an ATSC tuner or else go without television if they cannot afford one, even if their analog sets are in perfect working order.

Viewers foregoing television for the foregoing reason will have a huge effect on the networks and their local affiliates, not necessarily in that order. Every lost viewer means X number of dollars in lost advertising revenue for the stations and the networks, which will eventually end in disaster (stations going off the air and networks having to cut back even more than they have so far, especially in this down economy) if it continues for any length of time. This is why I say that analog broadcast channels must not be removed from cable service as long as there are analog TVs in use--and right now there are probably far more analog TVs than HD FPs in American homes. To be sure, most of the analog sets are probably, even likely rebadged black plastic cubes (for example, my own set, an RCA-branded XL-100 CTC185, was made by Thomson), but as long as these sets are around and in use, cable operators must offer local channels only, as a separate tier of service. There is a word that describes perfectly what the government is doing (forcing digital TV on the viewing public whether they like it or not), not to mention the can of worms the DTV transition has opened as far as OTA reception problems in some major cities are concerned, but I can't use it here.

[3Guncolor]

Jeff,
Most cable customers already have converters so they are already watching the digital versions if they have an older televisions. Customers with your level of service are not a big source of cash to support the space analog takes on the cable system. It all comes down to $$$$. If we don't keep up with dish we lose. I believe there some rules inplace on how soon cable system can remove broadcast analog from their system. I just have never looked into because I don't work in programming they just tell me when to add or take off channels. Don't expect any changes for a while. They may take a few of the lower rated cable channels from analog basic but like I said analog broadcast will stay to the end at least the must carry stations will. There is an FCC rule that says cable must carry a local station if they file for must carry. And yes cable can be forced to pay a local station to be carried on the system. Those stations could say it's ok to drop them from analog as part of the deal maybe they get something else on the system or more $.

[peverett]

From what I have read, the cable companies are required by the FCC to carry the local channels in analog until 2012.

Some of them were sneakily moving non-local channels from the analog suite to digital and blaming the DTV conversion earlier this year. The FCC got wind of it and implemented a moratorium preventing this for a period of time(I am not sure how long). They sure are ethical aren't they? In my case, Time Warner stole(yes stole-I got no price break or replacement channel) my National Geographic and 2nd PBS channel.

[AUdubon5425]

I think the price difference is around $10-15 between the "expanded basic" and least expensive digital package through my cable company (Cox.) I would imagine that if they decided to do away with analog cable in three years they would do one of two things leading up to it: raise expanded basic up to digital prices (citing all the bandwidth analog requires) or lower the digital service a few bucks. Either way, they'll still rake it in renting out all the additional cable boxes that will be needed.

I'm already renting one cable box ($5.00/mo.) because the wife can't live without a couple of stations on the digital package. I refuse to rent more, which is why my older TVs are hooked to the aerial on the roof (via the DTV converter boxes.)

If it weren't for my wife I probably wouldn't even have cable. There's nothing on those 200+ channels that would compel me to spend over $70 a month.

[radiotvnut]

Comcast has a service called "Digital Lite" that includes the regular expanded basic channels, music choice, and 4 digital programming channels (CSPAN2, Lifetime Movie Network, Hallmark Channel, and the Gameshow Network). The price is $53.50 + $3.25 for each converter rental. Was $51.50 + $4 converter rental.

Analog expanded basic (about 64 channels) is also $53.50. On digital lite, you get the same $64'ish channels plus the four digital programming and music choice channels.

What they did was remove the 4 channels that are now digital from the analog package and then said "but we'll give you a converter to watch those 4 channels". I think the plan was to get a converter in as many homes as possible; then, they could dump analog service when they felt like enough homes were saturated with digital cable boxes. From what I'm hearing from people, I don't think their plan worked like they thought it would. Many people are happy with the standard analog service and not interested in renting converter boxes for their TV's.

When I ordered analog cable in December, 2007; they told me that I'd be better off just to go ahead and subscribe to a digital package because there would be no more analog cable by mid 2008. I told them that I wanted analog cable and we'd cross that bridge when we came to it. Guess what, I still have the same analog channels that I had then.

If there comes a point where I have to rent a cable box; I'll either cancel the service or rent one or two boxes for the most used TV's and connect the other TV's to an antenna.

[AUdubon5425]

One big problem with the digital cable boxes: you can not flip through the channels. Pressing "channel up/down" on the remote or the box is a frustrating experience - it takes up to five seconds for the channel to change, and you pretty much have to go one channel at a time.

Besides that, I think I'm on my fourth or fifth box since October 2007. The last time Cox came out the serviceman managed to change the rf connector on the box I have now. But problems with these boxes have resulted in my needlessly rewiring three cable lines in my walls & attic due to the initial insistence of the "techs" that the problem was with my wiring, not their equipment. (The wiring was new at the time.)

[radiotvnut]

I've also heard of these boxes crashing and needing to be unplugged and re-booted. In other cases, I've heard of the cable company having to send a signal to them in order to get them back working. About a month ago, one lady called me to see if I could figure out why some of her digital cable channels were freezing, dropping out, etc. I told her that she needed to lean hard on the cable company. For what cable TV cost, it should be perfect.