The Digital Cliff

[altivo]

That's a term used to describe the abrupt decay to unusable of a digital signal at a certain distance from the transmitter. The point at which this occurs depends on the height of the transmitting and receiving antennas, the terrain between them, the frequency of the signal, and various other factors. I got around this evening to looking at

Comments

[lobowolf]

Happy Birthday to Gary!

I'm in the same boat with TV. I've lost all of my Boston stations (as I predicted). I could probably put up a dish, but I don't want to pay $60 a month. TV in its present form isn't worth paying anything for.

I have one PBS station (X3 streams), one religious station (X4 streams) and one ABC affiliate (1 stream). It's there, but I have no CBS, no NBC and no FOX.

[altivo]

Fox and NBC are no loss anyway. We did like the news and weather from the independent WGN, though. It's popular on cable systems all over the US because it's so "different" from the network affiliates.

PBS reception was never good here. We have the coupons, and will probably get the box anyway, but I doubt it will do much.

I'll pass your greeting on to Gary. Thanks.

[lobowolf]

I got the same feeling that you did. The FCC said "Oh well, screw the rural TV watchers. They don't count. Besides, it's 2009..everyone has cable or satellite!" :P

[altivo]

I'm getting used to the "let them eat cake" attitude. We've heard it on health care, education, access to the internet, and now television. If the digital radio proponents get their way, we'll be hearing it about radio as well. The BBC already did it to us on international short wave news coverage several years ago. They decided that the US no longer needed to receive BBC World Service, since they provide it as an internet stream. Good thinking guys. How many of your listeners were in rural areas? Did you even ask? I think not. The print newspapers are going to be leaving us high and dry too as they move to internet only, with high bandwidth pages that we can't pull down over a 40 Kbit connection, dumping their rural readers into the trash bin as all the rest of the corporate entities have done.

[songdogmi]

A few public radio stations carry BBC World Service overnight. Two of our three in Detroit do (yeah, redundant, of course, but it's Detroit, we have a lot of redundant radio here). I don't know if that availability played into the decision of the Beeb to cut out the shortwave broadcasts to North America.

[altivo]

When I complained directly to the Beeb about it, their response mentioned that "overnight" service. At least at the time of the cut-off, no station audible here in the hinterlands was carrying it. In any case, I'm sleeping at 1 am, not listening to the radio. The old World Service broadcasts were timed for dawn and dusk, the best reception times for Europe, and also the best times to fit them into my schedule.

Same story as with US power brokers. We were written off as irrelevant. They mainly stressed the internet availability of their programming, which is nonexistent here. I can subscribe to it for a fee by getting downloads through Audible.com, but that comes a couple of days late and isn't worth the hassle. I did try it for a while.

[rustitobuck]

What's really dumb is that one fiber would fix all that. After all, you have electric power, and you have wired telephone.

I don't think you're that stuck on radio, though. If I come visit, I'll bring my satellite radio gear and see if it works. It includes BBC world service.

Until the powers that be get their heads out their asses, there's Netflix. You seem a patient guy...any good television show goes to DVD at the end of the season.

[altivo]

Proper installation of fiber would fix a lot of woes in this area, but of course it costs money and the payback would be spread out over ten years or so. Not the sort of thing we get from American corporations these days

[altivo]

Oh, and thanks for suggesting Netflix but no, they won't do. We did have a Netflix subscription for several years, but that's just entertainment media and we lost interest in it after exhausting the supply of PBS and BBC productions that interested us. It can't substitute for a timely and detailed local weather forecast such as what Tom Skilling offers, and certainly won't provide local news at all. I'm really amazed that politicians are letting this happen. They apparently don't realize that they are losing the ears of voters in the areas affected. Evidently someone has lied to them, implying that the number of people affected is so small it won't matter. They must have fallen for it.

Objectivist/Libertarian/Conservative theory says that small local cable companies or television stations will spring up to fill the voids, but when you consider the size of investment required to start such a venture, and the slow return it would provide, the chance of that really happening is vanishingly small.