DTV delay - Does it matter?

Now you know why I turned into a heavy drinker. Otherwise I'd have to give serious thought to hillbillies, the "war on drugs" (HA!), and our daily Bread and Circus

We'll probably soon degenerate to the "entertainment" that was featured during the Middle Ages, when Heretics were killed by Church Sponsored torture

Time for a drink

 

If there was no TV how would people work out how to spend their stimulus money? Hmm Maccas or Burger King, hmmmm?

 

Pat, stop talking sensible!

 

Ummm. Haven't been exposed to fear factor, survivor and other reality shows lately, I gather. I hear there is a new one about the science of how people died (killed themselves?) in weird ways.... Getting closer.

 

No, no, and NO. I click on the tube twice a day to watch the weather forecast. Considering how "accurate" they are, might as well open the door and peek out

Oh great, I really needed to learn about that. Time for a drink

 

Around here, the peek method doesn't work so well. Given the variability and terrain, weather prediction is more difficult than most people assume. Mountain climbing requires carrying four-season clothing, even in August. Where you live, you should be able to see the weather coming from Regina.

 

The peek method works here, for about ten minutes. The weather is too chaotic for any longer period. When I am heading out on the boat, I kind of like it when the weather is bad - it just means it's that much sooner that we will get good weather. How is that for convoluted logic?

Tom

 

Hi All,

Tonight we find out. We find out how many people will start yelling because their TV starts to get jammed by the uncoordinated changeover. Some of these stations will be comming up on frequencies occupied by other stations (analog or digital) and until June 12th, any little enhancment in over the horizon propagation will probably make the fringe areas of both stations unusable.

Although, we probably wont see much of this in Chicagoland, the stations here have all decided to stay put for now.

I remember being accused of jamming Channel 2 at my neighbors house when I was a teenager. Which could not have been happening because my ham station was not even powered up. So, I went over there and sure enough Channel 2 was a total mish-mash. But, it was no interferance I had ever seen before. Watching it for a while, I noticed the audio switching back and forth between local CBS and other stations. Yes, this was in Chicagoland. I then changed to Channel 3 which has no allocation in Chicagoland (at the time) - and there was a perfectly beutiful picture of New Brunswick, Canada coming through. That is about 1200 miles from here. This was a very rare case of F layer propagation (one of the modes that Short Wave Radio works by) extending up to 66 MHz. Actually higher. I tuned to Channel 4 and there was Nova Scotia, Canada station. That is 66 to 72 MHz. Back on Channel 2, all the Channel 2's on the whole north eastern seaboard of North America were jamming CBS Chicago.

So, the neighbor, an Insurance Excecutive (VP Metlife if I remember right), did not believe me that it was not me. So, I asked him if he normally got New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on his TV set. He played dumb, and that was about all I could do to help teach him. And this is what is happening to TV tonight. People without the background to make the decision have applied politcal pressure on politicians without the understanding to know what would happen. And tonight it happens.

 

That is one huge advantage to living in Flatlander Country: few weather surprises. We know it will be cold in winter and muggy in summer

 

I have a similar theory regarding the dating scene, especially the bar scene.

 

Very early in my career, I did some work on troposcatter systems. Kind of ironic when you *want* troposcatter, it's hard to get it to work properly, but when you do NOT want scatter or propogation, you seem to experience it

This only proves that mother nature is a cruel, heartless wench

 

Hi Jayman,

Very familiar with tropo-scatter and tropo-ducting. I took meteorology as a tech elective even. Had a few cute future weather girls in the class too. My EE main professor did a tropo-scatter report for the FCC when they first came up with TV allocations. He said UHF has the most pronounced tropo-scatter. Based on the study, they allocated the channels for a spacing that would not promote interferance.

The channel 2 thing was definately not troposcatter or ducting. It was too far for scatter and there were not any more channel 3's or 4's in there. Both pictures were solitary. This implies a skip phenomena. Scatter with a broad beamwidth antennas would have resulted in many more stations. And this occured in the middle of the afternoon a bright sunny day - which would tear up the duct due to convection. Besides, 1200 mile long weather fronts rarely form.

I once saw a duct form from Kansas City to NW Burbs of Chicago. We had a network node that was picking up another from Kansas City. I saw the node come through the network and tracked it down. They happened to be on the the same frequency. At that point in the network developement, all the LAN nodes were off on different frequencies with multi band linking inbetween. That is a good 300-400 miles. The node naming convention started with the two letters of the state. So, it was pretty apparent when a KSXYZ node showed up in the routing tables.

 

Lucky bugger, I never seem to have that sort of luck

Did he do the report for Western Electric. AFAIK it was Western Electric who designed/built the troposcatter system used by the military

The troposcatter system operated at 900 MHz - within the UHF band - and used quad diversity. The DYE radar sites on the Greenland ice cap also used this system

Thinking of that weird DX, was there unusual weather conditions, eg unusual high pressure events? Could it have been ionospheric?

I don't think e-skip can happen at 900 MHz, but am unsure. It sounds like you are more qualified to answer this question than I am. I do recall aurural effects but that was up north, not around here

Freaky. Even the moon can be involved. Older Cold War search radar had poor gain and sensitivity, and used power thresholds exceeding several hundred KW, even into the MW range. They operated usually L band

With so much power, a few scary false alarms were caused by moon reflection. Hence the need to manually "gate" the moon return

 

Hi Jayman,

No, this was a research thing for the FCC, so they could figure out how to space TV stations.

The KS to Chicagland was on 145 MHz. I was monitoring at home and did not hear any other unusual activity. I have been on 144 MHz when Sporadic E happens , and then the its busy from 144.2 to 144.3 MHz on SSB. None of that was going on that day. It was late summer, and weather could have been involved. It only lasted a few hours. I did connect through the network and over the ducted path to Kansas City node, but could not find a warm body to talk to at the time. I met the guy who operated the node at a conference about a year later.

These stations do not have the power or antenna gain to do a moon bounce. I have helped another ham install a moon-bounce antenna. Another ham from our club at U of IL ended up at a Aerocebo for an internship. There was a brief period they found out they could use the antenna for ham moonbounce. So, they hooked up a 60 watt 432 MHz transciever to it. This was preanounced about a month in advance. They made many contacts easily, with other hams "off the moon". These other stations had moon bounce stations, which when talking to each other can barely be heard, even though they use up to 1500 watts (legal limit). The signals are also wierdly modulated as the antennas are not narrow enough in beamwidth to illuminate a small portion of the moon. With the whole moon illuminated there are all sorts of interfering reflection components. With the Aerecebo effort the signals were very strong and steady. An antenna to do a moonbounce echo needs to be about the size of a 10 meter earth station dish.

Recently, the moon was very low to the horizon here. It was like driving into it on one trip. I could not help think about moon bounce. These near horizon moontimes are advantagous, as one can nearly double the effective gain of the antenna with earth bounce.

 

Just curious if Western Electric got involved. They built a lot of the military hardware for troposcatter back then, and it seems their fingers were into everything

Did anybody ever offer a plausible theory? It drives me insane when I can't figure out something

Yeah, I mentioend the older military DEW line radar sites, especially the very high power ones at J Site in Thule, Greenland. Some operated at 400-500 MHz, a couple at 1-2 GHz, with up to 2 MW.

The first time the moon bounce happened, it apparently caused a panic and bombers were launched. Once they realized the return didn't match any known missile, bomber, etc, it was the moon bounce

The older systems had to manually gate the moon return. The new phased array systems do this automatically with software

 

Can't they simply paint the moon with radar absorbing material?

Tom

 

First they need to clean it with sugar soap but they haven't worked out how to get a woman up there yet.

 

Oh man, you are going to pay for that comment <said while ducking for cover>.

Tom

 

That probably would have been easier

The old radar site had waveguides that looked like a giant church organ. To manually gate the moon return, somebody had to dream up actual cogs and gears, like a haywire Babbage computer run amok

Ah, the good ole days. Kind of sad to rip all that ancient stuff out. I've always been fascinated by old technology, like the IBM vacuum tube "computer" at the old SAGE sites

The 120 ton chiller capacity was to cool the vacuum tubes. There was what we would now call an EPO Emergency Power Off. If the chiller quit, you were supposed to hit the panic button within 20 secs, or risk melting parts