Obama team urges delay in digital TV transition

[peverett]

We have a station here that broadcasts weather on a subchannel. The problem is RECEIVING the information during bad weather. It has been my experience to date that I receive a frozen picture and no sound on all DTV channels during fairly strong thundersorms. This is while analog, although somewhat snowy, continues right along. It is a weakness in the DTV technology, not what is being broadcast.

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by peverett

We have a station here that broadcasts weather on a subchannel. The problem is RECEIVING the information during bad weather.

Hopefully, this (Mobile/handheld TV) below will be a solution:

http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/72382

Probably for small handheld displays like those on fancy cell phones. If it works, the reception would be more robust than regular ATSC set top boxes, and hopefully future full size DTV sets could use this new mobile/ handheld signal as a fallback if full HD reception goes bad. Assuming the program is a simulcast of the regular HD program.

"Central to the M/H system are additions to the physical layer of the ATSC transmission
system that are easily decodable under high Doppler rate conditions. Extra training sequences
and forward error correction (FEC) are added to assist reception of the enhanced stream(s).
Consideration has also been given to the many system details that make such a signal compatible
with legacy ATSC receivers, particularly audio decoder buffer constraints; but also such
constraints as MPEG transport packet header standards, requirements for legacy PSIP carriage,
etc. These changes do not alter the emitted spectral characteristics."

-- page 12 of http://www.atsc.org/standards/cs_doc...1-ATSC-M-H.pdf

[peverett]

Sounds like it won't hurt. I wonder why this was not done in the first place.

I would only expect standard definition(good enough for weather info) in the condtions they describe, not High def.

[colorfixer]

Higher overhead in the stream means less bandwidth available for the programming. This would mean fewer SD channels, or low/no 1080.

[peverett]

What colorfixer says is true, but I would assume, at least for stationary TVs, they would design the system such that the options mentioned by wa2ise would only be selectively used-only during very poor reception conditions.

As to mobile TVs-good luck on getting 1080 on these anyway.