[Discuss-gnuradio] SBE CHAPTER 40 NEWSLETTER and DTV

[Tim Pozar]

If folks are interested in DTV technical issues, you may want to
subscribe to teh SBE Chapter 40 newsletter. Good pointers...

Tim

----- Forwarded message from Tim Pozar <address@hidden> -----

From: Tim Pozar <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Subject: [Sbe-announce] SBE CHAPTER 40 NEWSLETTER - MARCH 2002
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 14:30:46 -0800

                      SBE CHAPTER 40 NEWSLETTER
                              MARCH 2002
                            San Francisco
               Roy Trumbull - Editor address@hidden
                        Bill Dempster - Artist
                                   
             Advertisers for this month's newsletter are:
  _________________________________________________________________
                                   
         [2]Zack Electronics - [3]Judi Lomas - (888) 329-0225
      [4]Advanced Marketing - Frank A. Santucci - (650) 365-3944
             [5]Belden - [6]Steve Lampen - (415) 440-8393
          [7]Orban - address@hidden - (510) 351-3500
               MARCOM - Martin Jackson - (408) 768-8668
     [9]William F. Ruck, Jr. Broadcast Engineer - (415) 564-1450
     [10]Audio Accessories - [11]Rosie Alexander - (510) 787-3335
[12]Kathrein (Scala Division) - [13]Michael Wm. Bach - (541) 779-6500
   [14]Hammett & Edison, Inc. - [15]Dane E. Ericksen, P.E. - (707)
                               996-5200
           [16]LeBLANC - [17]David A. Hill - (650) 574-4600
     [18]Gentner Communications - Kelly Hanning - (800) 879-9317
   Improbable Missions Fource - [19]Mike Schweizer - (888) 4-ISDN4U
            [20]Econco - [21]George Badger - 650-327-7599
[22]RF Specialties of California - [23]Bill Newbrough - (888) 737-7321
             [24]ADC - [25]Russ Erickson - (877) 440-7877
          [26]Enco Systems - [27]Steve Rooney - 800-ENCO-SYS
                                   
              Babes/SBE Luncheon on Wednesday Mar 27th 
                                   
This month we'll have a presentation about the [28]BMS Microwave
[29]Carry-Coder which is a COFDM box. These units are know for
staying locked while the transmitter is in motion.

As usual, our luncheon will be at Sinbad's [30]just south of the
Ferry Building on the Embarcadero near the foot of Mission St. We
meet at 11:30 and are seated at 12:30. To make reservations call
Paul Black at 925-827-9511 and leave a message on his machine.

                        SMPTE iBlast Meeting 

This month there will be a SMPTE meeting March 28th at the Garden
Room of the RoundTable Pizza in Menlo Park, 1225 El Camino at Oak
Grove Av.  Buy your own dinner from 6:30 - 7:30.

Peter Lude' of [31]iBlast will talk about using DTV data transmissions
for internet connections thereby getting around the bottleneck of
the internet server farms. The internet will be as close as a
receiver card in your PC. Recent improvements in DTV receivers,
8VSB demodulation technology, antennas, and software applications
are allowing the creation of a wireless data broadcast infrastructure.
Within the last few months, the first thousand end-users have
subscribed to various datacasting services across the country, with
strong growth projected in the next several years.

                         Lo-Band TV and DTV
                                   
There are only two lo-band DTV stations on the air in the U.S. They
are WKYC in Cleveland and WBBM in Chicago. At the ATSC web site
([32]www.atsc.org) there is a paper dated Dec, 2000 of a study to
compare 8VSB to COFDM. One of the tests was done at WKYC. The 8VSB
did better than COFDM because COFDM gets killed by impulse noise
and the lo-band is loaded with it. That said, there were a surprisingly
low number of test sites that received either signal in comparison
to the other three studies that involved UHF stations. It remains
to be seen if lo-band is viable at the power levels granted by the
FCC.

Last year at the fall IEEE conference a paper was given entitled:
[33]"DTV Coverage and Service Prediction, Measurement, and Performance
Indices". Its authors were Oded Bendov, John F.X. Browne, Charles
W.  Rhodes, Yiyan Wu, and Pierre Bouchard. It seriously questions
whether the planning factors used by the FCC for DTV are realistic.

Oded Bendov of Dielectric has questioned the noise figures used by
the FCC and in particular the wisdom of ignoring galactic noise
sources that are prevalent at VHF.

In a talk I heard by Browne in Canada about 1997, he was the first
to raise the planning factor issues and was kind enough to copy
many documents for me.

Charles Rhodes was the chief scientist at the ATSC test center in
Charlotte, NC. He is concerned about the effects of mismatch between
the antenna and receiver effecting the required carrier to noise
ratio.

Wu and Bouchard are scientists from the Communications Research
Centre in Ottowa who have given papers over the past 2 years about
their extensive testing of receivers and reception conditions.

If this august group of scientists and engineers says there's a
problem, then there's a problem.

          Subscribe to the online version of the newsletter 

The electronic copy version of this newsletter is now availible via
a mailling list. You can subscribe by going to
http://www.lns.com/mailman/listinfo/sbe-announce and filling
out the form there.

                              WEB PAGE

Webmeister Tim Pozar has the current newsletter plus newsletters
all the way back to 1996 at: http://www.lns.com/sbe

References

   1. mailto:address@hidden
   2. http://www.zackinc.com/
   3. mailto:address@hidden
   4. http://www.admk.com/
   5. http://www.belden.com/
   6. mailto:address@hidden
   7. http://www.orban.com/
   8. mailto:address@hidden
   9. mailto:address@hidden
  10. http://www.patchbays.com/
  11. mailto:address@hidden
  12. http://www.kathrein.com/
  13. mailto:address@hidden
  14. http://www.h-e.com/
  15. mailto:address@hidden
  16. http://www.larcan.com/
  17. mailto:address@hidden
  18. http://www.gentner.com/
  19. mailto:address@hidden
  20. http://www.econco.com/
  21. mailto:address@hidden
  22. http://www.rfspec.com/
  23. mailto:address@hidden
  24. http://www.adc.com/broadcast
  25. mailto:address@hidden
  26. http://www.enco.com/
  27. mailto:address@hidden
  28. http://www.bms-inc.com/
  29. http://www.bms-inc.com/carry-coder.htm
  30. 
http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?title=Sinbad%27s+Restraunt&size=small&style=MEDIUM&point.0.label=Sinbad%27s+Restraunt&point.0.icon=11&mapdata=xU4YXdELrnBP%2FRAVGMTY0%2FTtSYJZrVdPtTFX8XG9pVyJ379tXw4eEoQc3omk3CaNeaPacRaBKR%2FwyEd53nCyjDuJ6v8JPNkuuxoNE%2FS%2BRn%2FsuKPgBHtQLI66kEeucKSr%2ByXiJQJtSVA0l6bKnJ62DX65h9Np1OHoH8Ih6YiQEFCrXXY7%2Fz5%2ByfZog%2Flv3GhCekbruXDgRo3qs4FTpZzH%2BLme67F%2Fw5UMcv9PpC3%2B33XkGMF2mQBvc39xAot2qXOuBvLqH4rgbiE0QG04iucJw%2FHoTwgub79g0gBY2XFgDriMHjvRovHCYJ5%2BMxSTrDC2GR6SsO8FKR7Oa5wGVaW6QSY2A3kLAbwrbu%2BeazOzvg58Zgs56ntqi3SlafPnenbJK65aLIInCxwsAkiVzasIcryi7vJcIfVy&submit.x=60&submit.y=10
  31. http://www.iblast.com/
  32. http://www.atsc.org/
  33. http://www.atsc.org/papers/Performance_Assessment.pdf
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----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
  Snail: Tim Pozar / LNS / 1978 45th Ave / San Francisco CA 94116 / USA
               POTS: +1 415 665 3790  Radio: KC6GNJ / KAE6247
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."
                        - Andrew Jackson
"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out,
which is the exact opposite." - Bertrand Russell, "Skeptical_Essays"