Charles W. Rhodes

I recently attended and participated in the annual meeting of the National Translator Association, which is composed of TV translator operators. You might be surprised at their number.

Now that the FCC has established its timetable for broadcasters to elect which channel to return, I believe these same broadcasters will seek to maximize their DTV facilities.

Distortion comes in two basic classes: Linear distortion, which is not an oxymoron; and nonlinear distortion, which includes all other distortions except noise.

This is the first allotment table having no analog TV channel allotments; it is our future broadcasting universe.

The future is digital, 16:9 and gigantic. And I believe the future is now.

As many DTV signals are radiated in the UHF band with more than this power, they enjoy some signal level margin within their coverage area.

Any active device, amplifier or mixer will generate second order distortion products given that the input signal voltage overloads the active device.

Such second-order distortion products may be generated by strong local FM radio signals in the front end of DTV receivers and downconvertors.

In this market, all vacant channels in the high VHF and UHF bands are also adjacent channels to one or two broadcast channels. So are adjacent channels really suitable for sharing?

My concern is the interference such signals may cause to reception near the secondary transmitters

What a DTV signal can do that an analog signal such as NTSC could not do is to awaken sleeping persons believed by the local authorities to be threatened.

The IEEE Consumer Electronics Society celebrated its 75th anniversary at the International Conference on Consumer Electronics in January, along with the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

They found that signals of this form produce what amounts to co-channel interference into channel N. Take my word for it, they would also have found the same in channel N+3K.

Two more reports of laboratory testing of DTV receivers have recently been made public and the news does not portend well.

What is needed is an EAS which can alert the threatened populace while not scaring the entire nation. Our present EAS cannot do this, but a well designed Digital EAS could over our DTV channels.