TMJ's Sean O'Flaherty at the NAB

[Tom Snyder]

Every Spring, the National Association of Broadcasters holds its annual convention in Las Vegas. Sean is a member of our group, and is also an engineer at WTMJ. This thread will contain his reports....

[Tom Snyder]

Sean originally posted this report as part of a message in another thread. To keep this thread together, here is a copy of his first report...

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Attendance is way down this year at the broadcaster's convention (NAB).

I went to a technical paper today on a new design for DTV receivers. It sounds very good.. but the chip is 50% more complex than existing chips and will cost more.

It's designed to solve the problems of indoor reception, especially in "metal" homes.. like those with metal siding. The designer says homes like that lose 5 to 30db of the available signal. Often the only signal getting in is though the windows. And once inside it bounces around like it is inside a tuned cavity.

To deal with ghosts the new receiver has a much bigger equalizer than existing chips, but thanks to More's Law that's not much of problem now.

The bigger problem was synchronizing the receiver to the signal when the DTV pilot signal comes and goes in a poor reception area.

So instead of just using the pilot, the LINX chip looks at several parts of the ASTC signal and syncs up to what ever ones it can find. (The present NTSC system uses 30% of signal for sync. The European DTV system uses 12% of it's signal for multiple pilots. ATSC was designed to eliminate all redundancy. Only 1.2% of the ATSC signal is repetitive information that can be used to synchronize a receiver.)

There's a demo here at NAB, but I haven't seen it yet.

Press Release at: http://www.linxelectronics.com/news040802.htm  

Other items of interest — Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, now with LoudCloud, told a crowd at a keynote speech that he has the HiPix HD tuner card in one of his PC's hooked up tohis RCA DirecTV receiver. The card saves HD files to his hard drive. It looks "fantastic" he said. But he joked that there wasn't much content, except "Becker" and "All My Children."

There is a tiny "DTV store" at the convention, designed to show off what products are available.It was jammed when I was there today, could not get close to some of the equipment. The sets are stacked 4 and 5 levels high.

Zenith had the first set to display the new version of digital TV Closed Captions (708-B) but it's a 4:3 set (C32V23).

The literature lists an RCA DTC-1000, and Samsung SIR-T151 and SIR-T165. I didn't see them, I'll look harder tomorrow. Are they misprints?

I'm not up what models of the Rear Projection and Direct view TVs are new. I'll try to ask.

Yesterday I spent some time at a session on PSIP – The data that tells the receivers what to do.

A representative from Sharp talked about his work on the new Recommended Practices for receiver manufactures, CEB-12. There is also a companion Recommended Practices for stations. Both are out for final vote. They will be published as soon as they are approved.

According to the new proposals, receivers should cache data for Virtual Channels from its last visit, so tuners will tune much faster.

Stations should send 3 days of guide data every 1 minute.

Sets will have a new mode when they are not in use, receivers will visit each channel to collect Guide data for next 3 days.. Will spend about 1 minute per channel. The "visits" will probably happen overnight.

If receivers are to control recording and auto tune to a channel on time: Stations should send accurate time data... It should be accurate to 1 second or better 100ms... And all stations must agree on the time or sets will probably average it out.

-Sean

[This message has been edited by Tom Snyder (edited 04-09-2002).]

[Steve Mann]

Excellent information, Sean. Keep up the good reports. I know I certainly appreciate your efforts. Oh yeah... Have a little fun while your there too!  

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Steve M. Mann
Mits 65908
Panasonic TU-HDS20
Sony SAT-T60
My Home Theater
My Young DVD Collection

[oflaherty]

I was able to spend a little more time at the DTV exhibit. Had to go right to the top, Mark Richter, head of the ATSC to find out that the RCA DTC-1000 was a misprint... also a mistake because the DTC-100 was not on display either.

The Samsung SIR-T165 features a DVI port and a 1394 firewire port in addition to the usual outputs. Should be available in the fall.

I told Richter's assistant Christy Kehlbeck about our group in the Milwaukee area.  

To keep the record straight, I'm not an engineer, I work in news management.

--
Sean in Las Vegas

[Kevin Arnold]

Ahh, Haaa!!! I always knew you guys managed the news.  

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Kevin Arnold
38" RCA widescreen w/a Winegard on a rotor.

[Matt Heebner]

 

Matt

[oflaherty]

The Treasure Island hotel lost Internet access, so now that I'm home, here are a few final notes from the NAB.

I spent some time with the folks who run TitanTV.com. In addition to data for viewers, they offer TV stations data on what zip codes are clicking on guide data for their station. They also have two new products, Retail Zone which stores can use to predict (based only on distance & transmitter power) which stations a home "should" be able to get... and ProximityTV.com for stations to see the zip code data that stores are getting from Retail Zone about customer interest in buying HDTV's.
The main company is called decisionmark.  http://www.decisionmark.com/news_NAB_release_4-9-2002.html

There were several HD DVD's being shown, especially by Panasonic and Hatachi.

--
Sean (now back in Milwaukee)