[BC] HDTV rollout wrinkle

[Scott Fybush]

Mike Murrell wrote:
> I'm not downing TV but if there was a mistake made or
> there's an issue then the FCC should fix it rather than allow these stations
> to go back to 6 and maintain or create other issues.  Guess I'm from the old
> school of fix the problem not look for a work around.

I think some historical perspective on the DTV power issue is important 
here: the FCC has a consistent history, going back to the very beginning 
of VHF operation in the late 1930s, of underestimating the amount of 
power needed to provide usable service to typical consumer receivers.

Analog TV went through these growing pains in the late forties and early 
fifties, with even greater problems to resolve: not only were power 
levels incredibly low by today's standards, but co-channel spacings were 
far shorter than they should have been. (Channel 4 was used not only in 
Boston, NYC and Washington but also in Schenectady and Lancaster, PA; 
channel 7 was used in Wilmington, Delaware as well as in Washington and 
NYC; channel 11 was used in Providence as well as in NYC; etc.)

It took several rounds of reallocation and power increases - and 
improvements in antenna and tuner technology - before most Americans 
were able to receive TV with an indoor antenna.

What about those early UHF stations, most of them running anywhere from 
1 to 5 kilowatts (!) peak power into low antennas?

And even leaving aside the politically-motivated move of FM "upstairs," 
it's been largely forgotten that the original 88-106 mc FM bandplan had 
no third- or even second-adjacent channel protection, stacking up 
stations far more closely than the receivers of the day could handle. It 
took a complete reshuffling of the FM band around 1948-49 to establish 
the spacings we know today - and the process of getting power levels up 
where they needed to be for reliable indoor and mobile reception lasted, 
arguably, right up to the approval of 6 kW class A service in, what, 1989?

Having said all that, I do agree that the DTV conversion should have 
included provisions to eliminate the channel 6 protection issues that 
have so long bedeviled noncommercial FM stations. It's still possible to 
fix that problem now, with only a handful of full-power stations on 6 - 
but as ever more class A LPTVs migrate *to* channel 6, and if the FCC 
eventually opens a new TV allocation window, it may be too late.