Digital television

How the Government Failed to Prepare for the Digital Television Transition (2009)

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• published: 08 Jul 2016
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U.S. markets which have presented unique problems for digital transition include: New York City-Newark was one of the early U.S. terrestrial digital television pioneers with state-of-the-art ATSC facilities installed atop the World Trade Center as early as 1998, but those facilities were destroyed in the September 11 attacks, and for a number of years, New York lacked one single point of sufficient height from which to cover the entire region without severe multipath interference issues in downtown Manhattan. The 1776-foot 1 World Trade Center, proposed to replace the former World Trade Center, would not be completed for some time, so several scenarios were considered to enhance service. One such system, called distributed transmission, was being funded by a $30,000,000 federal grant to assure that no viewers are left without service. The DTS would have used low power transmitters to fill gaps in coverage from the Empire State Building. The Metropolitan Television Alliance, a group of eleven New York and New Jersey broadcasters organized soon after the destruction of the facilities at the World Trade Center, has been leading the development of the DTS system. In 2004, a partial solution was implemented: the top of the Condé Nast Building at 4 Times Square was reinforced and installed with a massive multiplexed UHF antenna. This relieves overcrowding at Empire State by using the site of a local Clear Channel radio facility to replace master antenna installations destroyed at WTC. New Orleans and portions of Mississippi were operating some digital transmitters from temporary locations or from towers belonging to other stations due to damage done during Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita in 2005. While stations are now back on-air, the coverage area often does not match that specified on the station licenses due to the change in antenna locations. Denver faces unique multipath interference problems largely due to its mountainous location; its antennas on Lookout Mountain will need to increase in height to overcome obstacles to digital reception, but attempts to get local zoning approval have met with strong opposition. Federal legislation was ultimately used to require that Denver stations be allowed to construct their post-transition digital facilities but sharp nulls and gaps in coverage remain. Sparsely populated mountainous regions such as Montana and Utah currently rely heavily on broadcast translators to rebroadcast network stations into underserved communities; while these low-power retransmitters are not themselves required to broadcast digitally, many will need costly upgrades to receive a digital signal from the originating station—if the signal can be received at all. 23% of the 4000 licensed translators have received a federal subsidy[41] to make the conversion,[42] but many others will simply go dark. In sparsely populated markets such as Glendive, Montana, translators are needed to reach a widely scattered audience but the readiness of many small municipally owned translators remains largely unknown. Many other stations in the Rocky Mountains had chosen to end analog broadcasts early because of poor winter conditions at transmission sites in February; stations needed to be sure they can make the on-site adjustments. For these broadcasters, the DTV Delay Act and its extended deadline of June 12, 2009 comes too late to be of use, as the digital transition has already been completed. Vermont, a market in which all major stations are as of February 2009 digital-only, is problematic as both a rural state and a mountainous region. WCAX CBS 3 Burlington and WPTZ NBC 5 Plattsburgh, New York are now both UHF broadcasts from Mount Mansfield, causing many viewers to lose the stations. Previously as analog VHF stations, WCAX transmitted from Mount Mansfield, while WPTZ was broadcast from Terry Mountain in Peru, New York, on the opposite shore of Lake Champlain. Buffalo, New York, a city whose stations mostly broadcast from among the Boston Hills and cover a fairly rugged terrain along the Appalachian Plateau, is one of several markets in which the primary stations are VHF stations that operate on 2, 4, and 7. All three stations were assigned DTV channels in the UHF spectrum; all will lose significant broadcast coverage in the transition, and viewers in the western Twin Tiers region will lose all of their broadcast stations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_television_transition_in_the_United_States Image By Savil95 (Kari Haley) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/karihaley/3768304786/) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons