Re: OT: firewall program

Joel Koltner wrote:
"Joerg" <notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:w_jGj.23783$Ej5.17695@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Still, I am not looking forward to all that DTV because for us it'll mean we won't be able to watch TV on days with lots of clouds and thus multipath, or when the Fedex and DHL freighters lumber into Mather Field.

Perhaps if ATSC really does revive over-the-air broadcast popularity we'll see continuing development and improvement of the chipsets?


AFAIU it's the modulation scheme that is inferior. While it does offer better HD capabilities it is supposedly not nearly as multipath-robust as the European system.


It occured to me that early on NTSC was rather poor too (my boss claims that it wasn't until sometime in the '80s when reasonably-affordable TVs had its performance limited by the NTSC signal design itself rather than engineering cost/performance tradesoffs made in the TV set itself), although I realize that those early problems such as color separation, sychronization, and lack of frequency response usually led to a degraded-but-still-watchable signal rather than the typical "all or nothing" response you get from digital transmissions one the BER gets too high.


TV set designs were the pits for a long time. Ok, NTSC does not feature an alternating chroma carrier phase like PAL but a better sync to the porch or the H-sync could have done the trick. It's like comb filters. We did that during my final project in the mid-80's and it took the TV industry more than another decade (!) to figure that out. I couldn't believe it, and after one consumer company said "No, we don't need any EE help" I decided to go into medical electronics where things are a whole lot more professional.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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