RE: re Digital TV !!!OFF TOPIC!!!

["Keith Doxey" <ukha@xxxxxxx>]

True. Digital Terrestrial is CAPABLE of really high quality.
False. Digital Terrestrial currently gives a superior picture to analogue.

Because most of the UHF spectrum is taken up with High Power transmitters
for the 4 main analogue channels (note Channel 5 is also very low power in
many areas), they have only been able to allocate 6 frequencies (or MUXES)
to each transmitter area for the digital transmissions.

In a vain attempt to give viewers access to extra channels of crap, the
amount of bandwidth assigned to the channels is mostly inadequate for a
decent quality picture so even fairly minor changes in a picture can result
in pixelisation of the image.

Another side effect of the extra compression is that the reduced data rate
leaves little room  for error correction and because of the limited
information transmitted in the first place, the slightest interference will
cause horrendous breakup in picture and sound.

It remains to be seen if the quality and choice will improve once the UHF
band is fully assigned to digital. Somehow I doubt it. Possibly there will
be some "Premium Pay Channels" of high quality and hundreds of
other
channels all showing repeat of soaps and quiz shows that should never even
have been made, let alone transmitted again and again and again. I have
noticed the quality of several SKY Digital channels drop as they add more
channels without adding extra transponders.

Keith

-----Original Message-----
From: Kenneth Watt [mailto:kennwatt@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 18 January 2002 21:20
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] re Digital TV !!!OFF TOPIC!!!


Andrew,

AFAIK, the problem is that in many areas if the broadcasters ramped the
digital signal up to an acceptable level it would interfere with the old
analogue transmissions, Keith went into this before as well. Then you
would get an outcry that it wasn't acceptable to many people,
particularly older age groups, most of whom couldn't give a fig about
DTV so long as they can get Eastenders and Corry without forking out for
an STB.

The logic goes that if the broadcasters and government can get enough
people switched to digital then they can shut down the analogue
transmitters and use solely digital, thereby allowing them to really
ramp up the signal strength.

I have been told that, on test, a pure digital feed from a terrestrial
aerial can achieve *almost* HDTV standards and this is why Europe has
not gone with the Yanks & Jap HDTV system as it is a lot cheaper and
easier then the US/JP system.

HTH

K.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Woolass [mailto:andrew@xxxxxxx]
> Sent: 18 January 2002 20:35
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: [ukha_d] re Digital TV
>
> Does this mean they have overcome the signal strength issues that
limited
> the coverage of OnDigital / ITV Digital?
>
> I had to get Sky to get digital signal, terrestrial TV reception for
me is
> VERY poor.




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