Andy Whiteside, VP of engineering at Acrodyne, is bullish on Mobile DTV and the opportunity it offers broadcasters to reclaim over-the-air audience, which has been diminishing for years.
At this early stage of Mobile DTV implementation, broadcasters must wrestle with a host of issues, the most of important of which may be providing adequate signal strength in all the places people use handheld devices.
A variety of approaches must be considered. According to Whiteside, it has been demonstrated several times that a big-stick high-power plant can deliver a high-quality mobile signal to a large area. However, if coverage is not what’s expected and a station is not maximized, that station should consider applying for maximization and antenna improvements. Beyond that are other options including adding vertical polarization, deploying a single frequency network, and on-channel repeaters, he says.
This week, Andy Whiteside discusses these and other RF-related issues related to deploying Mobile DTV.
This week’s Sound Off is presented as a podcast.
