HDTV ATSC tuner STB ratings

1: The generation 5 DTV receivers are already available. The DVICO Fusion 5 PCI card receives ATSC and QAM 64/256. I've seen other announcements as well. 2: Magnavox made a 'ghost killer' for analog TV. They called it 'Image Lock' and I have 2 units which work extremely well. The broadcasters send 1 line of sine sweep which the receive box flattens back out. It also corrects deficiencies of the entire transmission chain after the signal insertion point. 3: After you see or better yet, live with HDTV for a while, you won't care about analog std def TV. The wide shots in the dramas are excellent and if you like football.....

My prediction--set top boxes will bottom out $19.95. The electronics are not much different from a DVD player and they need no moving parts. GG

That's not my experience. One of my local analog stations has lots of ghosting, but comes in clear on digital. Of course the two channels are on very different frequencies, so who knows what's really happening. I know of no way to tell if a problematic digital channel is just not getting enough signal or is suffering from multipath.

On the edge, you can watch, and get some info, out of a crappy analog picture when a digital signal is dead. In the middle ground, the digital is crystal clear when analog is a bit fuzzy. Anyhoo, that's been my experience so far.

In Europe, those OTA STBs only work with 720x576 interlaced producing

625/50 interlaced PAL, S-video or SCART-RGB, i.e. no change in resolution or refresh rate.

Paul

My ATI HDTV Wonder and Samsung TS-165 both have multipath processing but have issues with how fast they can correct the signal. the newest generation 5 receivers can (almost) work in a moving car. That would help during a rainstrom where my antenna looks through trees. The motion of the tree disturbs the multipath processing.

As for that 625 PAL and 720x576 issue, that is just a computer nerd thing. They like to ignore trivial things like rack mounts, retrace times, video and audio levels, signal interfaces and other thing that make my life 'interesting' (ANNOYING). NTSC 525 has 483 active lines. The 601 sample rate is 858 sample/line of which 720 are active pixels. The remaining time is retrace for the CRT. Same idea for PAL.

GG

Slow tree motion isn't a problem. Last years storms at times had nearly horizontal rain and those trees got moving pretty good as I blithely sat on the couch watching OTA HDTV breaking up. Oh well, switch over to std def cable for the duration.

It would be interesting to see how the DTV signal is processed for multipath since there isn't any line or frame structure in the data stream-- well at least that you can see with a plain old scope.

The old analog standard continued to improve over the years as we 'grew into it'. Is there room to do that with the DTV standard or is this a case of 'it is what it is'?

GG

Hello Sal,

We are in 'them thar hills' where even Walmart carries steer manure, fuel pellets, horse feed and cow feed supplements. So maybe it is different out here.

Yes, the OTA crowd is small. But large enough to create a major headache in an election. Unless, as Glenn predicted, converter boxes retail for something like $19.95.

That would be very disappointing. I mean, handling multipath problems isn't exactly rocket science. If they don't have it in current boxes, what were they thinking?

Regards, Joerg

Hello Glenn,

I just wonder what took them so long. Multipath mitigation is rather easy and the TV standards provide lots of pilot content to do that, for example during vertical blanking. They always did. Yawn...

This is one reason why I turned down a job offer from the consumer industry when I had my degree. Not enough challenge.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Paul,

That's what they had to do, in order not to render masses of TV sets obsolete. That would have seriously angered 90% plus of their population and created a huge environmental problem.

IMHO the picture quality does not matter unless content improves. We can receive three times as many OTA channels than we could 20 years ago yet our TV consumption has dwindled to about 45 minutes a day (the news). And even then we pay attention to the set for maybe a grand total of 20 minutes. Most of the time when the weekly TV guide comes with our daily paper my wife looks through it and says "Nothing worthy to watch this week". Oh well, we don't really need TV. It may be different for fans of the mainstream sports but not for us.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Glenn,

I just wonder why slow motion disturbs it. On regular TV you can acquire the reflection footprint during V-blank and then the corrective pattern would have to hold for the next half-frame. If the trees sway faster than that it's time to forget about TV and get the heck out of there. Well, it's probably even too late for that by then because some tree might already be airborne.

Besides terrestrial multipath we also have 'aeronautical' multipath. Mostly these are freighters on a slow approach in Mather field. They fly through the RF path for several minutes because it is the same direction as their approach. During that time a lot of reflection-altering things happen. Their autopilot corrects the glide slope, flaps are dropped, the landing gear plops down etc.

All I am asking is that a 'new and improved' technology lives up to at least the same performance as analog TV. Yeah, the image might become a bit lousy but we can continue to watch the news and even read the weathermap well enough on analog TV when Fedex lumbers through our skies. If DTV would produce a complete data loss for the same event that wouldn't be acceptable.

Oh, and we have a local airstrip right in the middle of our village. For many residences you can actually taxi right into the garage with your airplane. So there is the next challenge, the occasional Cessna 172 smack dab in front of the antenna. No big deal with analog TV, you just see the reflected signal instead of the real one but one hardly notices. We just get the news a millisecond later.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Glenn,

AFAIK this is where the COFDM standard would have been better. IIRC that's the one they use in Europe and it is quite multipath resistant. What I heard from Berlin is that it works well even on an indoor piece of wire with lots of high rises around. Maybe we have saddled the wrong horse over here, who knows. Time will tell. Thing is, if the transmission collapses people won't be served well no matter how many features it may have.

Forcing hold-outs onto cable or satellite won't work either. Many don't see any sense in shelling out $50-80 for stuff that they don't use much. They may just make the leap to the web or quit watching altogether. I can watch the news on broadband if I had to and that's all I am watching anyway right now. Oh well, something good might still come out of it even if terrestrial DTV blows in some regions. Families might actually do something they never did. Like eating dinner together at one table ...

It'll be more difficult. NTSC used to be "Never The Same Color" but that was fixed quite well. I have lived in Europe and in the US. Besides a lower resolution and somewhat lesser sound quality analog TV in the US is very comparable. With DTV I just hope they put enough flexibility into the boxes so they can be reprogrammed on the fly if they fix some bug in the standard. If not and people have shelled out north of $2k for a plasma set it'll have to be "it is what it is'.

What I really hope is that they did enough field tests and not just in the easy flatlands. If not then OTA stations may be in for major layoffs because the ad revenue could tank.

Regards, Joerg

Andy, if you're in USA, yes, the transmission is similar to analog broadcast with all the possible quirks like multipath. Similar in that they use 6 MHz channels in the same spectrum though the large majority are UHF. A few are high band VHF (channels 7-13) and a very small number are channels 2-6.

An antenna that does a good job with analog will do just fine with DTV. My first year with DTV I used a Winegard CH8200 all channel unit with excellent results for both analog and digital. After we moved, the antenna had to go outside but the wife wouldn't put up with the conventional antenna so I ended up with the Winegard SquareShooter which is just fine for the LA area.

Having worked at a channel 3 and sweep aligning the transmitter, I would not want to have to set up a channel 3 for DTV. It was hard getting 4.2 MHz bandwidth in analog. The 5.8 MHz in digital would be a bear. Don't tell me-- the manufacturers have modularized the transmitter to the point that no alignment is needed. The FCC first phone really IS a fishing license with a broadcast endorsement.

GG

What is the price for European OTA HD ATSC STB? Who is making it? What chip set do they us? THanks.

Please tell us what is this multipath technology? how it work in digital broadcast? any difference with analog? Does OTA antenna any different?

doesn't

Isn't the best HD broadcasting show is actually sports programs, such as football and baseball games?

So who is making the most promising chip set for US HD OTA and Cable STB?

Hello Amy,

In our area, mostly yes. That's why I am not so enthused about it. But occasionally there is that nice PBS series.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Paul,

Right, only DVB (COFDM). A friend over there bought a complete DTV card including rod antenna for his laptop for 79 Euros. That was right after DTV was introduced in Berlin so they might cost even less now.

Regards, Joerg

Is DVB broadcasted from antenna tower? Similar area coverage to typical analog broadcast?

Europe does definitively not use ATSC.

In Europe and Australia DVB-T is used for OTA (Terrestrial) broadcast, which is a COFDM multicarrier system. In Australia both SD and HD distribution is used, so you might get better information about chip sets from there.

In Europe, the only HD contents is distributed from satellites in DVB-S and redistributed in cable systems in DVB-C and currently MPEG2 compression is used, although there are rumours that some broadcasts would be switched to MPEG4.

There are currently no official OTA HD standard but it is unlikely that MPEG2 compression would be used, MPEG4 on DVB-T would be more likely.

Paul