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 coverage maps for the new digital signals of the broadcast television stations we used to receive here. As I expected, we are in the dark blue (probably not usable) zone on all of them. Only violet or no signal at all would be worse.

Terrain and distance to the transmitters are the factors in play. The nearest transmitters are in Chicago, Rockford, and Milwaukee. Even with analog, our Milwaukee reception was very poor. So I looked at WREX (formerly channel 13 in Rockford, ABC affiliate,) WTTW (formerly channel 11 in Chicago, PBS affiliate,) and WGN (formerly channel 9 in Chicago, independent.) None of them look to be worth the bother of even redeeming the "coupons" for a converter box. The problem is that we are in the Kishwaukee River Valley, a shallow depression between two long glacial moraines that separate the Fox River and the Rock River. Rockford is on the Rock River, so there's a pile of gravel and iron 50 to 100 feet high between us and them. Chicago is on the shore of Lake Michigan, about 150 feet lower than we are but divided from us by the other moraine which rises 50 to 80 feet above our level. Not that we watched much broadcast television anyway. News and weather occasionally was about it. The last time we actually watched any significant amount was probably during the 9/11 attacks. Still, it's irritating that the government and the broadcast industry have written us off as "irrelevant" along with all the other people living in similar areas. The only remaining alternative here would be a satellite dish, requiring special installation at a distance from the house, which is quite costly. (There is no cable TV here at all.)

Today was a zoo at work. Summer Reading always generates a lot of requests for new library cards. But there was also a Spanish class in the library this morning, which seemed to bring a flood of people with little or no English who wanted cards. Then in mid-afternoon a group of Red Hat Club ladies arrived for a tour. They kept my boss busy for nearly an hour. Many of their questions were surprisingly detailed. It was amusing to hear her trying to explain ebooks and ebook readers (the Kindle was named in the question) to a group who were not even computer users and had difficulty grasping the concept. It didn't help that we had no actual reader on hand to show them.

Today is also Gary's birthday. Took him to dinner at Donley's, a Western themed steakhouse south of Union. They are a bit pricey but not too bad. The food is high quality and the servings are huge. We always bring home leftovers. The decor is fun, consisting of lots of real antiques from the gold rush era and the western states, mixed with western film posters and pulp magazine covers from the heyday of the western story. There are also Civil War relics and some old hunting trophies: moose, elk, buffalo. It was not busy or noisy, which is a plus from our point of view but probably not good news for the restaurant.

Farrier pronounced Tess better, and even trimmed more off her feet. No blood, no limp, so that's good news.

Oh, and it's raining again.

Comments

[quickcasey.livejournal.com]

Happy birthday to Gary.

I can't believe the digital TV signal is not everywhere. Bummer.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Even analog television was not everywhere. Digital doesn't travel as far as analog did.

I'll tell Gary you wished him a happy.

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

Analog "goes farther" because some people can put up with interference and a little snow. Digital holds its clarity under adverse conditions...until the bit error rate gets too high, and then it totally goes to pieces. Hence, the "cliff."

[doco.livejournal.com]

Satellite dish at a distance from the house? Huh? Why?


... I'm actually surprised that in a developed country, people were still actually _using_ terrestrial TV. I thought the UK was behind with that, turns out the US is much, much worse.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I think Europeans often fail to appreciate the greater distances between dense population centers in North America. Combine that with the fact that services such as DSL or cable television require an investment in infrastructure that is proportional to the distance to be covered, and you will easily see why profit-based corporations decline to provide those services to the rural zones between cities. Where in many European nations the government can and does intervene to make sure that everyone gets equal access to such services, in the US it depends entirely on the good will of the corporations. If they choose to write off rural residents as "irrelevant" or "insignificant" that's the end of it.

Satellite television requires a line of sight to the satellite. Our house is in a shallow valley between two ridges, and surrounded by a grove of 100 year old oak trees. There is no line of sight even from the rooftop. A dish would have to be located on a 100 foot tower adjacent to the house, or at the roadside on a shorter mast but 250 feet from the house. Satellite service is also pretty costly. We don't watch anywhere near enough television to justify the cost. That's why we don't do it for internet either. You have to buy a basic television package before they will sell you internet access on top of it. Much too expensive. Even terrestrial analog television was marginal here. The nearest stations are 30-40 miles away, and most are 60 or more miles distant.

[lobowolf.livejournal.com]

The US suffers from being very large and very spread-out. Population densities are minuscule by European standards and cable companies "cherry pick" and only cover places where the population density is high.


It's the same issue with Internet connectivity. Covering the "last mile" for rural customers hasn't been done because it's extremely expensive and there's some brutal terrain to overcome.

[lobowolf.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.

We "have" wired telephone, yes, when it works. Often full of static and occasionally no dial tone. Lines buried in the 60s and poorly maintained for 50 years have pretty much deteriorated. The same terrain that limits digital television limits cellular access in this part of the county as well. My phone uses the Sprint network and though Sprint shows us as a solid coverage area, we normally get only one or two bars anywhere on our property, and frequently none. I don't know about Verizon, but want to find out. AT&T coverage is nil.

Power here is dubious too. Daily flickers that reset anything with a digital clock, such as microwaves, VCRs, etc. are pretty much ordinary. Outages that last from a few seconds to two or three minutes happen probably once a month. Outages that last several hours, sometimes more than a day, come a couple of times a year. We've learned that running computer equipment without a working UPS is a very bad idea here. Because our well depends on an electric pump, we have to keep a portable generator as well. Horses and sheep need water whether the power utility cares about it or not.

I looked at the satellite radio offerings three years ago because it was an option I could have had in my car. At that time, I was pretty unimpressed. The stuff available from either Sirius or XM didn't look like anything I'd listen to. The prices didn't excite me either. Now I gather that the providers are on the verge of bankruptcy and I'm not surprised. They were just pushing the same mush that broadcasters have been slopping around for decades now. We get good reception of Chicago's PBS affiliate but I never liked their programming decisions even when I lived there. We get fair reception of WNIU from Rockford, but their programming is sparse on the features I like and doesn't include the BBC or the folk music programs.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

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.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

You wanted to put up a tower anyway.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Nope. I do not and will not.

[silver-kiden.livejournal.com]

you should write to all the major news corporations, about how rural areas are quite literally being cut off from the rest of the world. who knows, it might even see the light of day! also, tell gary that i'm sending him an e-lapdance for his birthday. :p

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I think the major news corporations are part of the decision to write off rural areas as irrelevant. Occasionally they do an item on it, but no one cares.

I did complain to the BBC and received a reply that seemed not to be just a form letter. Even so, it said in essence that people in the rural US didn't matter much to them. Like the rest of the corporate powers, they don't get any income from here, so I guess that makes a sort of logical sense.

As for lap dances, Gary would run away or hide under the chair. He gets embarrassed even by very mild things. ;p

[silver-kiden.livejournal.com]

well, isn't that just the cutest thing in the world!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, yes. On the other hoof, he can sit through violence laden films without blinking while I have to go throw up after five minutes.

[silver-kiden.livejournal.com]

oh, but i love those films! i know, i'll give him a lapdance while watching 300! :p

[baphnedia.livejournal.com]

For my piece, and this is completely a screwed up point to make, but while it cuts off rural stuff in so many different ways, rural is rural again.

I've been to some relatively remote parts of the world, where news from a nation's capitol takes a couple weeks to make it across the country side. The past ten years, I've never been able to 'get away from it all' anywhere in the United States.

The sad part for me is that I'll have to GO somewhere to get away from it all (rather than live somewhere like that). At least, getting a dose of serenity is something that is almost alien to those in the city.

I'm sure you're going 'wait, what?', but given the vilification the Internet is being given by the so-called 'voting populous', I figure that in the next ten years the internet will be completely regulated, and many of the things we enjoy now, as private citizens, will be a thing of the past. Private internet communities may thrive, and turn into the next wave of underground BBSs.

I dunno. I'm just rambling. I'm jaded, and I think most of the things I used to get out of the internet are gone. But that's just me.

Oh, also, happy birthday to Gary!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I wish you were right. Unfortunately, while we are being cut off from the technological connections to society, we also continue to lose our serenity. Noise and light pollution are growing here at an alarming rate, cutting off our view of the night sky and our ability to hear the birds. We have poorer access to communication media than some real wilderness areas out west, but more noise and pollution than many of the world's cities. This is a zone viewed as "exploitable" by politicians and corporations. A place to dig gravel pits or build disgustingly noisy race tracks and airports. Objections from the residents can be ignored because there aren't enough of them and they don't have enough money to make trouble. Sort of like an Indian reservation, I guess. Take what you want, dump what you want, they can't do anything about it.

[baphnedia.livejournal.com]

Curses! :(

[keeganfox.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday, Gary!

I mentioned it in another journal, but I'll say it again here. 500 channels and nothing on.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

True enough, and why I won't pay for satellite service. Being denied news and weather reports, though, is irritating.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

I am lucky. I live right on top of one of the most powerful transmitters in the UK. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emley_Moor)

My reception is nearly perfect. It's a shame there is so rarely anything good on.

Happy birthday goes out to your mate as well. :D

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You mean you can get reception on your dental work, eh?

Nothing good on is why I haven't upgraded our television and don't plan to do so, and why I won't pay a thousand dollars to install satellite service and $80 a month to keep it running. It amazes me that people do that, really.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

I don't have any dental work. ;)

But I have been told that you can get metal objects to "hum" near that transmitter.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

Re: satellite TV
Around here, satellite dishes have to point at an altitude of 38.9 degrees. So you would need to be at least 1.24 times as far away from an obstruction as the obstruction is high. For a pile of gravel 50 feet high, you only need to back off 62+ feet. Cable runs like that are no big deal - even if the dish were mounted on your roof, you would probably need more cable than that just to work your way around and through the house down to your TV. With trees, if you cannot get a clear view over them, you often can either get a clear view below the branches, or through them by trimming a branch or two.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We are literally in a small forest. At any given time, you might find a "window" through the trees, but when it rains and the branches droop, or the wind blows, you get cut off. It doesn't take much to cut off that kind of signal. The recommended location for a dish is out by the road, which would be at least 200 feet of cable that needs to be trenched in, plus the installation of a free-standing mast five or six feet high. That gets a clear view today, at an estimated installation cost of $1000 to $1500. When the fast-growing pines across the road reach some critical height, the view gets cut off. Those pines were planted six years ago and are now over 20 feet high.

As I've said, television is not worth that much expense and trouble to me. Neighbors who do require it have had to trim or remove trees repeatedly in order to keep their line of sight open. I value the trees far more than I care about television or even internet.

That still doesn't leave me satisfied about the "who cares" attitude of government and corporations. Nielsen says that 2 million households were "not ready" for the transition to digital, and I say they understimate by at least a factor of ten. The reason for the error is that they ignore areas that were already marginalized by the old system and are being utterly excluded by the new.

[flamekist.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday to Gary! Also, sounds like good news for Tess.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Thanks. He's a bit overwhelmed by all the good wishes from people he doesn't know. XD

[linnaeus.livejournal.com]

Happy birthday to Gary! Donley's definitely is a neat looking place. It's the starting/ending point for an organized ride the McHenry County Cycle Club puts on, so I've been there but never eaten there. Looks like I'll have to rectify that one of these days.

Sorry to hear that the switch to DTV has resulted in a step backwards for you guys. I appreciate the appeal of a TV-free life, but it's a shame that free broadcast TV is no longer an option for you and for such a surprisingly large portion of the country.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I recommend Donley's. Especially if you like to eat the flesh of furry critters. Heh. Sorry. It's quite good, really, but not exactly cheap. And they do have chicken as well, thank goodness, and some Mexican dishes and salads that are free of meat. For the big eater, there's a 26 ounce steak. $32 on the price range or something like that, so I suppose it better be good, but I can't imagine eating something that huge in a single setting. ;p Lots of decent choices in the $10-12 range though.

The thing that bugs me about the DTV switch is the utter lack of concern on the part of the FCC and the broadcast industry about all the rural and fringe areas that they are just abandoning. Saying "Oh, they can get satellite" is not an answer when satellite runs $69 a month plus potentially very high installation fees. Since politicians are now absolutely dependent on television for their campaigns, you'd think they'd be more worried about losing the ear of the voters, wouldn't you?

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

We're actually getting a better signal now that we have digital TV, except for PBS, which now has no signal at all. Analog was almost unwatchable, but the digital signal is clear most of the time.

What's strange is we used to get PBS' digital signal, but after the "transition", the signal disappeared and we can't get anything at all. The coverage map on the station's web site shows we're supposed to have medium signal strength.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You are probably in very flat terrain, though. Look at a coverage map for the upper Mississippi Valley or farther west in the mountains, and you'll see all the radiating lines of "no service" where mountain peaks (or even just respectable hills) get in the way. Analog signals usually wrapped over this with some loss of signal quality, but digital signals just fail once the line of sight to the transmitting antenna approaches the visual horizon.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

No hable espanol, still at least they seem to want to learn.

I'm happy for digital, we live so close to the big broadcasting towers that the signal wave doesn't reach all that well, but with the digital one we now get all channels clear :)