It appears WSVN is still having problems with their DTV reception. After the transition on June 12th the station had to send the FCC an emergency request for a power increase, which was granted, and went from 31kW to 63kW.
Insider posted a comment in my previous post about WSVN requesting the FCC for power increase saying WSVN’s signal couldn’t reach south of Kendall and north of Lauderhill!
Sunbeam which owns WSVN has petitioned the FCC again, this time to have their transmitter power increased to 158kW and to have a new “elliptically polarized directional antenna”
The request was accepted by the FCC on June 22nd.
At the same time Sunbeam’s other station in Boston, NBC affiliate WHDH is having issues as well since they moved from UHF-42 to VHF-7. There they’ve been forced to broadcast on the two frequencies at the same time until their reception problems have been resolved. There were viewers near WHDH’s tower saying they had no signal.
Now that all of the high-power analog (NTSC) service is gone, viewers and broadcasters are learning what I have known since 2000: digital TV (ATSC) is susceptible to impulse noise (man-made) interference in even the highband VHF spectrum. The power levels that the FCC originally specified for highband VHF ATSC service are often inadequate to overcome impulse noise interference. The Catch-22 is that increasing power levels may cause interference to distant market stations occupying the same channel.
Oh, well.
you’d think the frickin’ FCC would get it right after all this time!
I was looking at what Sunbeam’s consultant submitted and it shows that signal increase WSVN wants will go past Jupiter! their coverage would increase from 4,93 million to 5,09 million households
why VHF ? Why cant they all be UHF , who wants a super sized antenna …
Reetch… With any new system, there are bugs to be worked out… but I fear ATSC is too broken to be fixed!!
I think it’s going to continue to be just plain awful until we get our DTV system in the US up to snuff with the DTV systems used overseas. Here’s a quick comparison:
U.S. DTV
* 8VSB Modulation. Very sensitive to noise/multipath.
* MPEG-2 Video Codec. The latest and greatest as of, oh, 1996?
Worldwide DTV
* OFDM modulation. This is the same system used on 802.11G wireless cards, 3G cell service, etc. FAR more robust. Look at it this way… if 802.11G was sensitive to multipath problems, your wifi would never work inside the house, thanks to the short wavelength signal ping-ponging off everything!
* MPEG-4 or H.264 Video Codecs. Much more advanced and efficient. A greater number of audio and video services can be placed on the same amount of transmission bandwidth without appreciable loss in quality!
I kind of suspect the ATSC design was cooked up just to let Chinese manufacturers reuse the same nasty old chips that would otherwise just wind up in bargain-basement DVD players to bring life to a newer, more expensive line of equipment. I have yet to see a single ATSC converter box or ATSC-ready television that wasn’t made there!
I wondered why after all this time they stuck with MPEG-2 when in Europe they’re transitioning to MPEG-4.
As is Dish and DirecTV.
I get the feeling in 5 years we’ll have to buy all new TVs and boxes because we’ll have yet another switch happening…
I was having trouble with their signal on South Beach… so I was stuck watching WFLX… WSVN is better now though.