A Hitch in the DTV Test

A Question of Terrain

By Steve Liebenow

Here's a long response we received to last week's question about whether the Wilmington, NC, market is too small a venue for a meaningful test of digital transmission for over-the-air broadcast. The author, Steve Liebenow, is the headend manager for TiVo in the San Francisco Bay area.

In my humble opinion, Wilmington is not just too small; it is also too flat to be called a real test, except for the outlying areas beyond the curvature of the earth. Since digital is basically line of sight, perhaps, and I say this cautiously, perhaps this will be revealed via outlying viewers.

I work in the San Francisco Bay Area (Alviso/San Jose), and we use ATSC signals in our headend for testing our set-top boxes. I have engineers who live a mere 25 miles away from Sutro tower, the largest broadcasting antenna in the Bay area, perhaps the west coast, who cannot get DTV signals for their digital tuner boxes! Of course, the small range of mountains separating them from the San Francisco Bay may have something to do with this! (My location is approximately 45 miles south-southeast of the tower, and our antennas on top of a two-story building pick them up fine. But then we have basically only water between us and the tower.)

It is amazing how the government and FCC are not willing to admit that this is going to be a very large fiasco for many of the 14 million over-the-air viewers. How many people will have their only form of EAS alerts turned off? How many cannot afford to switch to satellite services? Some can get to cable plants, but I'd wager that the large majority will not have that option. Satellite service providers must be counting the days in bated anticipation!

I have a video service installer/contractor who works for us, who does a lot of private installations of satellite equipment and now ATSC antennas. He has had to remove so many newly installed jobs due to lack of signal that he now offers, for a small fee, a system test using a portable mast and antenna to check signal levels at the particular site before installing anything. He cannot tell me how many customers he has had to defer to their elected representatives because where they live is not served by the new signals properly, and these customers are currently receiving 10-12 analog channels off the air. To say that they were upset is putting it mildly. (I keep telling people to not buy the convertors yet ... once the February '09 deadline hits for switching analog off, people will be selling them on eBay for $5, unable to use them at their locations!) Imagine how upset these customers will be next year when they get nothing.

This contractor recently had jobs at two mobile home park complexes on the near south side of San Jose that for some reason are blocked from receiving ATSC signals as well, at least from Sutro Tower, which contains the most transmitters. He can get signal from a mountaintop tower, but I think he said it carried only one or two odd (not mainstream) stations. When he looks the sites up on the antenna Web sites that are used for signal sourcing and information, they "claim" to be good signal receiving locations. However, his meters are telling him otherwise.

He is hearing this same dilemma from many of his counterparts in the business as well. I'd venture to say that it would be pretty easy to confirm this independently.

Wilmington just doesn't have many real life features to it's topography - no hills or valleys to hide residences in - looks pretty flat to me. Something further north or out west may be a real test! We have lots of nooks and crannies in the hills. Even the Midwest would be better, with the dips and rolling hills, plentiful river valleys, etc.

I'm currently watching a five-to-six story steel framed building go up on the elevated landfill just across from our location at the very bottom of the San Francisco Bay. I wonder how large a black swath this will cut in the signals once you get 10-15 miles further south.

Personally, I do not see why the government couldn't have held back the spectrum from 50-88 Mhz to provide at least five basic analog channels. They didn't sell off the FM band, but I'd guess that they will try and do that soon enough with "pay for satellite radio" that's now available. The money they generated from this spectrum sale will pale to the money that will be spent trying to get people their "digital television." Certainly the broadcasters are not going to pay for repeater towers - not required by the FCC! So the government will need to pick up that tab. By the way, I wonder if the broadcasters/advertisers really understand how many viewers they stand to lose in any given area.

Steve Liebenow
TiVo