What’s the advantage of everything going digital? The FCC is requiring that all TV stations be digital by 2009 and all public service communications be digital by 2012. They say it’s for security reasons. Can’t the bad guy get a digital scanner and be back in business?
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Why Digital?
- Thread starter park
- Start date
With public service comms going digital and encrypted it would be secure comms even if someone had a digital scanner as they could not break the encryption. The RCMP here in Nova Scotia went digital on 800 MHz a few years ago and all comms are encrypted as well. No one has cracked it yet. As for television, I would say bandwidth is an issue. You can cram more signals into the same bandwidth allowing for more channels available in the same area. Is'nt off air TV going to move into a new freq band and free up the existing VHF/UHF allocations?
I heard there was going to be no more TV stations broadcasting over the air after 2009. Also cant say I like the public services going digital becouse ther will be no more listening in on the scanner. Wish they would stick to the good old rule if its not broke dont fix it. Also realy amaze me how much the bands have switched as it is with alot of stuff starting out on VHF low then to high then UHF and then 800mhz. I know there sure is alot of unused bands and it makes me wonder whats going to happen to it. 30-50 is already dead as door nail.
There will continue to be over the air broadcasts but they will be digital transmissions,not the old analogue signals. I copied the following from Wikipedia:
"DTV has several advantages over traditional, analog TV, the most significant being that digital channels take up less bandwidth (and the bandwidth needs are continuously variable, at a corresponding cost in image quality depending on the level of compression). This means that digital broadcasters can provide more digital channels in the same space, provide High-definition television service, or provide other non-television services such as multimedia or interactivity. DTV also permits special services such as multiplexing (more than one program on the same channel), electronic program guides and additional languages, spoken or subtitled. The sale of non-television services may provide an additional revenue source. In many cases, viewers perceive DTV to have superior picture quality, improved audio quality, and easier reception than analog.
However, DTV picture technology is still in its early stages. DTV images have some picture defects that are not present on analog television or motion picture cinema, due to present-day limitations of bandwidth and compression algorithms such as MPEG-2.
When a compressed digital image is compared with the original program source, some hard-to-compress image sequences may have digital distortion or degradation."
This of course means HDTV will be offered almost everywhere and transmissions can be made in wide-screen 16:9 format rather than the old 4:3 format.
"DTV has several advantages over traditional, analog TV, the most significant being that digital channels take up less bandwidth (and the bandwidth needs are continuously variable, at a corresponding cost in image quality depending on the level of compression). This means that digital broadcasters can provide more digital channels in the same space, provide High-definition television service, or provide other non-television services such as multimedia or interactivity. DTV also permits special services such as multiplexing (more than one program on the same channel), electronic program guides and additional languages, spoken or subtitled. The sale of non-television services may provide an additional revenue source. In many cases, viewers perceive DTV to have superior picture quality, improved audio quality, and easier reception than analog.
However, DTV picture technology is still in its early stages. DTV images have some picture defects that are not present on analog television or motion picture cinema, due to present-day limitations of bandwidth and compression algorithms such as MPEG-2.
When a compressed digital image is compared with the original program source, some hard-to-compress image sequences may have digital distortion or degradation."
This of course means HDTV will be offered almost everywhere and transmissions can be made in wide-screen 16:9 format rather than the old 4:3 format.
30-50 is already dead as door nail.
Yep here too, except for a electric company that uses 48.18 simplex (no hand helds) ! They have no trouble at all covering a very large area. I wish thay would give 30 to 50 to ham radio, that would be fun!
Yep here too, except for a electric company that uses 48.18 simplex (no hand helds) ! They have no trouble at all covering a very large area. I wish thay would give 30 to 50 to ham radio, that would be fun!
park said:
The california highway patrol has always been, and always will operate in the 40MHz band. This is because of the remote areas they need to cover. But otherwise havent heard much else there.
As far as digital television. Analog formats such as NTSC are terribly inefficient use of radio spectrum. The new 8-VSB and COFDM formats do more with less wattage and spectrum.
CBers should welcome digital television, because when you have TVI the neighbors tv will just blank out, so they wont know who's causing it.
Yeah the highway patrol uses the high 40 here as well. So ther is some activity in the 42-50 split of the band but i have yet to hear anything from 30-42.
...runna pile-up on 6m SSB