Weathering the Broken Links

After February 17th, 2009, there are going to be a lot of upset people.  It’s not news that the US government is mandating that full power analog TV broadcasting after this date.  But it may be news to some people that they’re not going to be able to watch TV anymore.

The government has tried to make it sound like you just buy a converter box, plug it in, and voila, you’ve got digital TV.  That might work for some of you, but it’s not going to for others.  Here’s why:

If you don’t get good enough reception with over the air analog TV broadcasts, you can cope with it.  It’s visually noisy and it may even have ghost images from RF reflections.  But you can still make out the picture unless the reception is really, really bad.  But with digital broadcast TV, if your reception isn’t good enough, you often don’t get any picture at all.  You can sometimes get just the audio.  If the reception is moderate you might get a picture but it’s full of blocky areas where there wasn’t enough information received to display the entire picture.  Or it might be jerky, only showing some of the frames and hesitating frequently while it tries to compose new ones with from the poor signal.

Case in Point

I was out of town visiting relatives.  We stopped by my wife’s aunts apartment.  She doesn’t get cable service through the apartment’s cable because she doesn’t want to pay for it.  She’s been using rabbit ears for years and, while she doesn’t get a great picture, it’s more than good enough for her even with a little noise.

A month ago she decided to upgrade to a new TV.  She bought one with a digital tuner in it and a new “HDTV antenna” on the recommendations of some kid at the local electronics store. After hooking them up she couldn’t get any of the 8 DTV channels currently broadcasting in the area.

Now her building is a mere 2 miles from all the towers.  I checked antennaweb.org and confirmed that she was in the “yellow zone.”  This means a “small multidirectional antenna” should work.  But the small multidirectional antenna she had really didn’t.  We futzed with it and found that at certain angles it would indeed allow you to receive a couple of the digital channels.  But no sooner would you move your hand to scratch your nose and the TV was unable to decode the signal.  The signal quality was simply too poor to allow reliable reception.

I speculated that the issue is that her unit is on the far side of the building from the antennas.  Basically her building is in the way.  Well she has a friend who, incidentally, lives on the other side of the building and was having trouble setting up her converter box for DTV reception.  So we went on over there.  Her problem was one of connecting things properly.  Once we fixed the connections, we turned on the converter box, set it up and had 7 of the 8 DTV stations coming in great.  This supported the suspicion that the building was in the way of the signal.

Back in the aunt-in-law’s unit we tried a few other things:

1. a different type of indoor antenna
2. hooking the TV up to the building’s cable to see if that would magically pull in a stronger over the air DTV signal than her table top antennas did (we weren’t really expecting it to but we decided to double check.
3. Use a coverter box to do the DTV decoding and feed that signal to the TV.  She happened to have a converter box identical in model to the one her friend was having success with across the building so we used that instead of inconveniencing the friend.

Outcome: Very Unsatisfactory

She’s going to try and find yet another indoor antenna that has a good reputation.  The Zenith “Silver Sensor” looks like it might be better than most of the others.

I’m considering building her one of these coat hangar antennas to see if it works better than the store bought ones.  I’m not sure she’ll want to use it because of looks, but if the option is no TV on February 20, 2009 she might not have a choice.

The Larger Problem

Solving my aunt-in-law’s problem aside, I’m going to bet there will be a lot of people who are going to get screwed by this transition.  It’ll mostly be people of low means.  After all, aren’t the people who aren’t on cable or a dish, by definition, unwilling or unable to pay the cost of those technologies.  These people are going to lose a basic service that they’ve taken for granted all these years.   Many of them, particularly those living in more remote areas will not be able to receive TV over the air anymore.

They’ll either have to invest in much larger outdoor antennas.  Or if they’re out of reasonable reception range, they’ll either have to switch to dish/satellite, cable if available, or just go without.  Yep!  Go without a service that’s been available for some 60 years.

Now why is this happening?  The answer the government puts forth is to free RF spectrum for emergency services:

Why are we switching to DTV?

An important benefit of the switch to all-digital broadcasting is that it will free up parts of the valuable broadcast spectrum for public safety communications (such as police, fire departments, and rescue squads). Also, some of the spectrum will be auctioned to companies that will be able to provide consumers with more advanced wireless services (such as wireless broadband).

Consumers also benefit because digital broadcasting allows stations to offer improved picture and sound quality, and digital is much more efficient than analog. For example, rather than being limited to providing one analog program, a broadcaster is able to offer a super sharp “high definition” (HD) digital program or multiple “standard definition” (SD) digital programs simultaneously through a process called “multicasting.” Multicasting allows broadcast stations to offer several channels of digital programming at the same time, using the same amount of spectrum required for one analog program. So, for example, while a station broadcasting in analog on channel 7 is only able to offer viewers one program, a station broadcasting in digital on channel 7 can offer viewers one digital program on channel 7-1, a second digital program on channel 7-2, a third digital program on channel 7-3, and so on. This means more programming choices for viewers.

Arguably, the government mandate will wipe out TV reception to a lot of people in the name of improving public safety communications.  Would you not say that being able to see a weather forecast or monitor the state of a storm or other emergency incident via TV is crucial for the public’s safety?

I know there’s radio too.  But TV has been around a long time.  It’s a mainstream broadcast medium.  You can convey information much more effectively with video and pictures than radio alone   And it’s going to stop working in a lot of places.

But, but, but…it will “offer improved picture and sound quality”… if you happen to live near a broadcast tower.

In short, thrifty and poor people are going to have their access to a valuable piece of public infrastructure mandated away by their own caring government.  How thoughtful.

Add: I happened across this article from last month pointing out the same concerns bached up with some study data.  It’ll be interesting to see how things turn out.