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DTV UpdateShowtime!...Not Exactly By Gary Stigall, CSTE Only one San Diego TV station now appears ready for the November 1 FCC-mandated digital TV sign-on. KGTV's CE Marge Baldwin says they will begin to simulcast on channel 25 their channel 10 signal starting Monday, November 1. Except for weekend early morning stop periods, they'll have the digital transmitter on full-time. Meanwhile, KFMB and KNSD have filed extensions to their construction permits which allow them each to sign-on at some later date. KFMB plans to begin airing digital signals full-time by January 3, 2000. CE Rich Lochmann says vendor deliveries and set-up have been behind the delay. CBS just last week drop-shipped only a portion of the DTV downlink inventory originally planned for contractor installation months ago. Now it's up to local staffers to piece together. Comark DTV transmitter installers left the site only partially finished for another job last week. And STL equipment arrived in completely inoperable condition. Presumably, the blanket November 1 deadline has put extreme pressure on vendors with fixed resources. "KNSD is pretty much ready to go," says CE Oscar Medina, "but we are in the process of dealing with a potential DTV/NTSC interference problem. As an N+1 adjacent, KNSD's channel 40 DTV signal has the potential of interfering with our channel 39 NTSC signal. In order to minimize the interference potential, both of our transmitters (DTV and NTSC) must be frequency locked to one another and the NTSC visual carrier must not drift more than plus or minus three hertz, a much tighter standard than required by FCC rules and regulations. "Our DTV transmitter is locked to GPS. However, we are the first N+1 situation that Thomcast (Comark) has had to deal with and they are in the process of developing a custom master oscillator they call "Anacad" to frequency-lock our NTSC transmitter to GPS. This will lock both transmitters to one highly stable source and that will allow us to maintain the necessary frequency tolerance specs required of an N+1 setup. "As soon as the Anacad system is completed and installed in our NTSC transmitter we'll be ready to begin testing. We don't have a target date but we should be on the air before the end of the year." KUSI isn't among the group required to go digital in this round. Says CE Richard Large, "Currently we have no set target date to implement DTV. Our position on DTV in San Diego is: 80% of viewers are watching local stations on cable and there's no agreement for cable operators to rebroadcast a DTV signal, so we would be transmitting to 20% of the viewing audience. Of that 20%, how many viewers will purchase a DTV television over the next several years? With no initial way to increase revenue, a potentially small viewing audience and a high capital outlay, a wait-and-see attitude looks good. Besides, will 8VSB or COFDM [be accepted] as the HDTV standard, or both. There are more questions than answers at this time....My new transmitter facilities are built ready for DTV. Physical space, power, tower and transmission lines are installed." XETV and KSWB haven't commented. Marge Baldwin says, "I heard about the delivery and equipment problems causing the delays over the past few weeks. We anticipated problems as well, that's why we set an earlier target date like September 13th to coincide with ABC's Monday Night Football. Even with all of the contingency plans, we still are working to the last moment to resolve our remote control. Not all of the pieces were delivered and we had to work around the problem." When asked to comment about their experience thus far with DTV, Marge Baldwin said: "A very EXPENSIVE venture in both the capital outlay and monthly expenses. The electric bill is going to run us at least four times what it use to run for the analog alone! We had estimated the increase, but was not real to us until the first bill came in. We have been limiting our on-air times to testing and ABC generated programming in HDTV on Monday and Saturday evening. Starting Monday we will be on full time. We will be upconverting our channel 10 product (which by the way looks really good compared to standard analog reception - the Leitch upconverter does a terrific job) and airing HD material as they made are available. ABC has Monday Night Football and movies on various nights of the week in HD. We can also air HD material from our D5 machine, but they would have to be provided to us. We do not currently have HD production capability. But via ABC or D5 through our switcher we can air 720p and true 5.1 audio with all 6 channels. When 6 channels are not available, we feed stereo to our Dolby encoders....All engineers associated with making DTV a reality should be complimented for pioneering their way through re-inventing the television broadcast!" |
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