Brad on Broadcast

Well, Feb. 17 came and went. We’re still alive. The sky didn’t fall.

Unless you’re Rip Van Winkle, you know that Feb. 17 was the original analog shutoff date. More than 400 stations made that switch on time, and guess what? Armageddon didn’t occur.

Even so, Washington still managed to screw things up. At the last minute, politicians decided that further delay wouldn’t cost them anything, so they imposed one. And, the politicians knew that adding a delay would provide plenty of political cover if voters got mad about the transition. “Hey, don’t blame me,” they could say.

I’ve received a fair bit of mail on the DTV conversion, so let me share some of it with you. Here’s what Broadcast Engineering readers think of the delay: more

Let me give you some advice about hotels in New York City. Don’t pick one that’s located in some off-the-wall location or on an unfamiliar street — even if it is part of a common chain. You’ll regret it.

I traveled to NYC last week to attend a series of press conferences. To avoid as many taxi charges as possible, I usually try to stay near the main event hotel. Using Google Maps, I located the press conference hotel and selected a hotel nearby.

I won’t bother telling you the hotel’s name because I’m not complaining about the actual hotel. Suffice it to say that it was located at 6 York Street. During my three-day stay in NYC, not one of the taxi drivers I used was able to locate the hotel. Even Google couldn’t accurately find it. more

My alternate title for this post: How I learned to hate broadcasters and everything they stand for.

Broadcasters should be ashamed of themselves. To quote a New American Foundation brief, “The Lobby that Cried Wolf,” “The one constant has been the broadcast industry’s unyielding opposition to new uses of the broadcast spectrum, or to any new technology that poses even the slightest threat to their bottom line.”

Benjamin Lennett, senior program associate for the Wireless Future Program at the New American Foundation, wrote that this paper “provides a glimpse of broadcasters’ lobbying path of deception, highlighting recent campaigns to keep others out of their spectrum and offering parallels with the current campaign against white space devices.”

According to Mr. Lennett, TV and radio broadcasters have been scheming since the early 1930s to keep away any competition. more

Remember the movie “Network?” Released 1976, it presented a frenetic and satirical view of a fictional television network, Union Broadcasting System (UBS), and its struggle with poor ratings. The single identifying element from this movie is the phrase, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” The UBS evening news anchor, Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, persuades the American TV audience to echo his frustrations about life by shouting the above phrase out their windows.

Today, broadcasters across the nation are lining up in force to tell the U.S. Congress the same thing, “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.” more

How’s your station doing, economically speaking? Are sales above last year? If your station is like most other companies, times are probably tough.

For most Broadcast Engineering readers, these are the worst economic conditions they have ever experienced. Jobs have been lost, companies and offices closed, and savings decimated. While this has yet to become the economic depression our parents experienced, it still hurts.

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Hang on to your rabbit ears broadcasters, there’s interference over that hill.

Broadcasters have to be concerned about the full-scale implementation of white-space devices. Let me give you only one example of what can happen when unlicensed devices are allowed to proliferate.

I operate two separate weather stations within my own home. One is located in the kitchen area and provides time and both inside and outside temperature. The second weather station provides a complete set of weather parameters, including wind direction and speed, along with other standard data. Both of these weather stations operate wirelessly.

Suddenly, the kitchen-located weather station stopped providing outside temperature readings. After multiple rounds of trying new batteries, I watched more carefully at what was happening with the outside temperature display. Turns out that the outside temperature reading was sometimes there and sometimes not. Watching the data over a week revealed that the data was valid early in the morning, prior to about 7 a.m. The display failed around 8 a.m. and was typically off most of the day. Then, around 4 p.m. the data came back for a couple hours going off around 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. and remaining so until about 11 p.m. more

Last Monday (Jan. 26), the Senate by unanimous consent (which means no recorded votes) approved Jay Rockefeller’s, D-WV, bill that would “allow stations to keep their old transmitters turned on until June 12.” That’s how CNN reported the action. Allow stations to keep their old transmitters on. Yep, and at the tune of $10,000 per month in electricity costs, I’ll bet every station out there is really happy to be allowed to spend that money for another four months. more