Johnstown, PA - HDTV - Page 3

I spent a few hours talking to her as well and that is the story she tells but the reality is that in the next 40 smaller markets the CBS station is passing HD in 34 of them.

I think it is a fair assumption that the income of nearly all of those stations would be smaller than that of WTAJ and they've found ways to do it.

So the economic argument doesn't hold water with me. The owners are simply too cheap to make passing HD a priority and the people operating the station, such as Kathy, may be very well intentioned but can only do so much.

It will have to be a competitive pressure and loss of viewership before they see the economic argument of it.

One would think that facing a maximization order that they would go HD to encourage viewers to switch to digital so they could achieve analog shutdown as soon as possible. Certainly *many* sports fans would go HD to watch the Steelers every Sunday in HD this fall. But it seems they just don't see that far ahead.

I think WPSX might be in the process of moving to their new studios at Innovation Park. I was at Telcove today for a meeting across the street and they were working on getting their new STLs up and running, it looked like.

Thems some big microwave dishes on the roof up there.

I know WJAC is planning to go to 1 MW if they have not already. Their MPEG encoder went screwy last night at 9:00p when network switched to HD. I dunno how long it remained like that.

I doubt they'd power up to 1 MW then drop back down to 250 kW unless there was a problem with the equipment. Perhaps someone with more broadcast knowledge than I might have insight.

I think you were lucky with the atmosphere.

Adelphia State College:

706 - WJAC-DT (NBC)
750 - HBO HD
751 - Showtime HD
752 - Starz HD
753 - Cinemax HD
770 - HDNet
771 - HDNet Movies
772 - ESPNHD

The system is currently limited to 550 MHz, a 750 MHz upgrade is underway but I don't know when we can expect the rest of the broadcasters in the area to buck up and go HD (other than WPSX - PBS), nor when Adelphia (soon to be Comcast) might add networks.

I would love to say soon but it doesn't seem like things are improving here as quickly as I would like them to.

I have to assume that with WWCP going to full power in the next 40 days that Adelphia will pick them up much in the same way they do WJAC and put the FOX-HD content on the State College system.

I am toying with getting some tower space at Wopsy and backhauling the KDKA-DT stream to State College for Steelers games and WTAE for Monday Night Football this fall at 5.8 Ghz. My problem is I don't know how much adjacent channel interference I'm going to get from WATM's TV and DT transmitters right there and I know I cannot get a filter agile enough to cut out 24 but leave 25 alone.

Of the people here with clear line of sight to Pine Grove mountain, is there any interest in participating in such a project?

What I'm looking at is using an Atheros-based 802.11a radio in their "turbo" mode which provides about 50 Mbps in actual UDP throughput. Combine that with an HD3000 card in a PC at Wopsy, dvbstream, and multicast, and assuming the fade margins are not too tight it should be wholly possible to get the streams up here.

WWCP was advertising that they were broadcasting in HD during the Superbowl. Since big-FOX is providing the ATSC stream to WWCP and all WWCP has to do is transport it to their digital transmitter I can't believe they're *not* doing HD. I haven't emailed their engineer in a long time but the last time I did I got no response.

As far as I know WWCP isn't at full power yet. I know WJAC plans to go to 1 MW but I don't think it has happened yet, they may be waiting until July 1 on the nose. I was pleasantly surprised to see WATM at full power already but thoroughly disappointed that they're not passing ABC in HD.

The WATM-DT stream is split at about 9.5 Mbps for WATM-TV and the same for WWCP-TV. The picture is much better than what we get from Adelphia but it still isn't HD. They could put ABC-HD on there at 14.5 Mbps and WWCP-TV at 4.7 Mbps and have the picture look great for both, with a quality encoder.

WJAC-DT's stream is just shy of 15 Mbps for the HD stream, the remainder for the weather subchannel, fwiw. I personally think that's a little tight for a 1080i stream but most of the shows on NBC-HD aren't very motion intensive. I hope the encoder holds up when NBC gets Sunday Night Football next fall.

The whole lack of HD doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If you as a station owner were being forced by the government to operate TWO transmitters at full power wouldn't you want to speed up adoption of the new technology so you could turn off one of those transmitters as soon as possible? By offering no improvement to go to digital there is no encouragement for consumers. Just having ths Steelers and Eagles available in HD would sell a ton of sets. Operating at 1 MW on channel 34 has to be significantly more expensive than WJAC's analog transmitter at 70 kW on channel 6. Nearly the same for WWCP and WTAJ. WATM is the luckiest in the market, there really is no material difference between 23 and 24 as far as operational cost so my guess is they'll simply retain 24 after the transition.

No, one would need an 802.11a radio to receive the stream and a PC to decode it. Its a little involved but beer and liquor can solve the problem. The Atheros chipset I am looking to use is capable of providing at least 41 Mbps actual throughput on some low end hardware and as much as 60 Mbps of actual throughput on better hardware. That's actual IP throughput on an air rate of 108 Mbps.


That would not surprise me but the fact they only need to purchase a digital STL to get HD on the air would leave me to believe that they can't possible be that cheap! I can buy 300 Mbps wireless links for $20k list, that's enough to carry 15 full rate ATSC streams.


A few points on this... Our market has high 80's penetration of cable and DBS, so there's only about 11-13% of the market that is OTA. That may contribute to the not caring about them.

Passing HD has nothing to do with the transmitter itself other than the transmitter must be digital. The transmitter broadcasts whatever it is fed, whether its data, HD, SD, or null data. My point is that starting July 1 they will be required to operate two full power transmitters driving the same exact content. As a consumer there is *NO* benefit to me to change to digital so I might as well hang on to the NTSC set and signal I'm getting now. By passing HD from network they would encourage many sports fans to change to digital and thereby encourage a faster transition.

Steelers in HD on CBS, Eagles and Nascar in HD on Fox, and Monday Night Football in HD on ABC... And with HD capable displays now under $1,000 in Wal-Mart the technology is well within Joe SixPack's budget. It's simply chicken and egg, I believe the broadcasters must provide a service to encourage consumers to change, they believe the demand must exist before the change will occur.

What they may be counting on is the FCC determining that cable and DBS penetration counts towards the 85% figure required to turn off analog in a particular market.

I just don't buy the economics argument when I look at it in the context of what many markets smaller than ours are doing.

I'm looking at 4826s for this project. I have a pair of 4501's I'm going to use to test some links with and eventually establish a connection between my house and new office downtown.

I'm also looking at a 4-port MiniPCI board with an Intel 533 MHz processor from Gateworks, but I'm having trouble finding this board in small quantities at the moment.

Pacific Wireless builds a 26 dBi 5.3-5.8 GHz grid antenna for about $70, according to Radio Mobile this is enough to get the link done. Pasadena Wireless offers the Atheros cards for $53, and a 400 mW version for $139.

It will take some testing but that's part of the fun.

Hey boys and girls...

I stopped at Adelphia yesterday to pick up an HD DVR from them since I'm tired of my current Myth experiement and would like to record premium content on occasion.

Turns out they're dishing out DCT-6412's with the new iGuide interface rather than that old clunky interface with advertisments that sucks balls. While the DVR interface blows compared to Tivo, I like the guide much better. It is actually useful now. I only wish the guide would take up the full 16:9 screen. Oh well, one step at a time!

Just fyi.

Heh, the whole comment is kinda funny.

On the day of analog shutdown both DBS companies and all cable companies in the area will carry their digital signal. Further, as of today there is no difference in content between their analog and digital transmitters. Saying that DBS won't carry their signal in HD and so they're not going to pass it is just an excuse.

Don't get me wrong, I really like Kathy and so I'm caught between extreme frustration with her station and liking her.

I realize we aren't a huge market, but many stations in many markets smaller than ours are passing HD from network and seem to still be in business.