Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!lotus!esegue!johnl
From: johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: BULLEish on Zenith Data Systems
Message-ID: <1989Oct19.005115.1523@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us>
Date: 19 Oct 89 00:51:15 GMT
References: <3938@blake.acs.washington.edu> <110200016@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine)
Followup-To: misc.misc
Organization: Segue Software, Cambridge MA
Lines: 24

In article <110200016@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>I fail to see where the problem with bandwidth for HDTV lies, other
>than with the FCC. There are 81 channels available, 6 MHz each.
>Around here the following ones are used: 3, 12, 15, 17, 22, 27, 55.

Well sure, you're in central Illinois.  Where I grew up in New Jersey, with a
pair of rabbit ears you can pick up channels 2,3,4,5,6,7,9,10,11,12,13,
17,29,48,52,56, and bunch of other UHF channels that I forget.  In much of
the country the VHF spectrum is full.  There's a fair number of free UHF
channels, but just to cover New Jersey, a small and not particularly hilly
state, they need four separate transmitters on four separate channels.  If
they allocate three UHF channels at a shot for HDTV, the UHF spectrum will
fill up instantly.  If you go to high enough frequencies, there's unallocated
spectrum, but such frequencies propagate even worse than UHF, so you'd need
even more closely spaced transmitters.

NTSC video stinks, but finding spectrum space for anything else will be a
major problem.  Satellite broadcast on a small number of channels (which
avoids the line-of-sight problem and also much of the air attenuation
problem) may be the only possibility.
-- 
John R. Levine, Segue Software, POB 349, Cambridge MA 02238, +1 617 864 9650
johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us, {ima|lotus|spdcc}!esegue!johnl
Massachusetts has over 100,000 unlicensed drivers.  -The Globe