Gazmik has left a new comment on your post "Sirius?XM Comment":
I can understand the change to digital TV. The broadcast signal has been the same for over half a century with modifications for color and stereo sound. And it does take a lot of bandwidth.
But the thing that I don't like is that in fringe reception areas, you could watch a snowy picture. But, if you don't get a good digital signal, it's choppy, or nothing.
I used to have a rather large TV antenna and a rotor and it was always fun to DX TV. Especially in the rare times when there was skip on the TV broadcast band. How well would that work with an iffy digital signal?
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The digital TV switch is a good example of the government rarely doing anything right.
It all started from the FCC's desire to auction off the analog frequencies. They brought in billions at the expense of the public having to convert.
I guess the next step should be to put the government in charge of Sirius/XM.
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A.J., I also enjoyed TV DXing when I lived west of Mobile, in a little (then!) community of Semmes...I lived on the last hill before the landscape went down to Big Creek Lake. I had a 60-foot tower and a decent TV beam, turned by a rotor...even if I didn't use the rotor, I could still catch some TV DX late at night. I'd come home from work about midnight and sit up and watch New Orleans or Meridian, MS like they were local. I liked WDAM in Meridian, because they had music videos, something new at that time (telling my age again!)
Later, when I moved north of Mobile, I put up that tower again, but this time, I was on the last, ending slope before going to the Mobile River. Terraserver says I'm 16 feet above sea level. It's a negative to try and get anything from the west, so all we got/get is TV stations from the east, and pretty much only the locals. That tower has since come down, in lieu of an 8' C-band satellite dish (that NEVER lost a signal), then the forced-upon-us 18" dishes (that loses signal when it gets real cloudy or rains hard). Now were being forced more technology that goes out in less-than-optimum conditions, as well; what're people going to do during hurricane season, et. al.?
In talking with videophiles and Ham radio operators who have tried the HDTV before the cutoff date- all agree that it's marginal, even inside the fringe area. The digital signal is either there, or it's not.
"We're from the government; we're here to help."
Bud, Mobile, AL
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