Brian's Brain

My wife's an avid 24 fan, and Sunday evening marked the two-hour kickoff for Season 6. Many years spent with a techie spouse have attuned her eyes and ears to prefer ATSC (preferably high-def ATSC) over-the-air television versus its NTSC predecessor. So we fired up the microwave oven to pop some popcorn, fired up the Samsung SIR-T165 ATSC tuner, and got, aside from occasional, brief blips of on-screen activity....a blank display, and no sound.

Whaaa? All the other digital channels now active in the Sacramento area were working fine. The night was clear and calm, albeit a bit cool (many winters endured while growing up in far-Northern Indiana do not allow me, even after almost 20 years in California, to refer to a temperature between 20-30 degrees Fahrenheit as cold). And, as you'll see for yourself if you visit AntennaWeb and punch in my home office coordinates, I'm less than 20 miles away from Fox 40's digital broadcast tower.

How'd we end up solving our problem? We switched, of course, to the NTSC broadcast. It was a bit fuzzy, but still very viewable, and consistent. The ATSC stream would have been much better, of course, but it wasn't an option. This all-or-nothing behaviour is basic to the binary beast, as any of you who lived through the analog-to-digital cell phone transition or have shelved analog AM/FM broadcasts for Satellite or HD radio know. But with just over two years till the supposed NTSC cutoff, it's something that broadcasters are going to have to deal with in an aggressive way, and soon, unless they'd prefer to deal with irate viewers.

The EyeTV 500 tethered to the Mac mini in the kitchen offers dynamically updated signal quality reports, and by means of debug I've captured two data points for you. Here's Channel 3.1, the NBC affiliate. Now, here's Channel 40.1 (Fox). To be fair, when I clicked on the OS X screen grab utility, the Channel 40 signal strength was worse than typical....at the moment (1PM PST) it's averaging around 60%. But in the evening it's down to around 40% on average. And what a static screen grab can't show you is that with Fox 40.1, the signal quality bar oscillates back and forth between 0% and 100%, spending an increasingly higher percentage of its total time at 0% as the evening draws nearer.

Channel 3.1, in contrast, solidly hangs at around the 90% signal strength threshold, with solid 100% signal quality. As does every other Sacramento-area broadcast station, regardless of where its antenna is located (distance and compass orientation) from me and from its peers; see this AntennaWeb screen grab for the details. But here's the really bizarre part of the story; according to the AntennaWeb report, Channel 3's broadcast antenna is within 1 degree of Channel 40's compass orientation, and is nearly 2 miles further away from me.

The problem in my case is clearly not with my setup, it's with Fox 40's broadcast strength, potentially coupled with differing digital broadcast channel environmental characteristics between it (55), and Channel 3 (35) and the other ATSC broadcasters in my area. But what of folks in far-off fringe reception areas, who right now are tolerating fuzzy analog pictures? Or those in multipath-rich reception environments? Or those who've tethered an excessive number of televisions, VCRs, and ReplayTVs and TiVos to their antennas, thereby attenuating the signal going to any particular piece of gear? For them, the blank digital picture and silent accompanying soundtrack are going to be far more difficult to diagnose and mend.

This situation reminds me of an excellent article I read last week while at CES, from one of the TWICE-published CES Daily Show Reports and a reprint of a writeup that originally appeared in Broadcasting and Cable Magazine. Click on the link in the previous sentence; I commend it to your inspection. The issues the broadcasters face, particularly smaller stations with limited budgets for equipment upgrades and replacements, are legion. The FCC is further complicating the issue by planning to auction off UHF channels above 51, thereby necessitating the relocation of broadcasters currently using those channels for digital transmissions....to, in some cases, channels currently in use for other stations' analog broadcasts. As Cox Broadcasting's engineering VP Sterling Davis is quoted as saying in the writeup, "How do we do this in the blink of an eye?" Plus, of course, for New York City Residents there's the sad fact that antennas previously located on top of the World Trade Center towers are no more, and alternative locations are already crowded with gear.

So what do you think, folks? Is the February 17, 2009 NTSC cutoff really going to happen as planned?