On March 8, 2010 at 00:50, Daniel Tonks said...
Removing UHF channels (and selling them) is the absolute only reason they couldn't have abandoned VHF completely, and frankly that's a poor excuse. Let's not forget that they already trimmed UHF down once before.
And what about the fact that analog channels had to be staggered while digital channels could be directly adjacent from the same broadcast point? That should have made up some of the slack...
I wonder if they shouldn't have tossed the whole system and started again, analog channels need to be 6MHz wide, digital ones could have been 3MHz wide, meaning that the tuner would look for a digital signature on the lower 3MHz if it didn't find one, it would look for an analog signature on 6MHz. If it did find a digital signature on the lower 3MHz it would look for another on the upper 3MHz. This would mean that digital transmitters and receivers would need to be different from analog ones. In these days of cheap microchips this should have been easy.
By the same token, I would propose that we renumber the channels, take the analog channel number, subtract 13, multiply by 2 and add 99, for the lower channel, 100 for the upper channel. Channel 14 would become 101 and 102, channel 20 would become 113 and 114, 51 would become 175 and 176.
As analog channels went off the air, you would gain space for 2 digital channels, as is if the channel space is full, you can't gain any additional space for new channels.
