[speedgibson] Speed Gibson: I Want My DTV

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Posted by Speed Gibson:
I Want My DTV
http://speedgibson.powerblogs.com/posts/1235961137.shtml


   I have a couple of portable radios that tune the analog TV channels
   2-13. The cutoff to all digital TV being delayed, I was able to listen
   to the NASCAR preview while out walking in the Howe neighborhood this
   afternoon.
   It's a nice feature I'd hate to lose, another use being to listen to
   the Minnesota Vikings TV broadcast. Even at their worst, the TV
   announcers are better than radio's shrieking homer Paul Allen.
   So far, though, it would appear a comparable device is not likely to
   appear on the market. Here's one explanation I found, courtesy of
   [1]WSYR Channel 9, Syracuse, New York:

     The issue is this: if you (as a manufacturer) have already designed
     an FM radio, it's very easy to add analog TV sound because you're
     only expanding the band a bit -- analog TV used FM for the audio,
     so there's very little additional circuitry needed to add the
     feature. Coming up with DTV audio is a much bigger task, and
     requires a separate receiver, logic to decode the station's PSIP
     tables and some kind of display to select which sub-channel you
     want, logic to filter out the data packets for the correct audio, a
     Dolby AC3 decoder, and a digital-to-analog converter. That's an
     awful lot of additional stuff to pack into a small radio, and it
     will take an awful lot of power to run. Offhand, I wouldn't expect
     to get more than about five or ten minutes from a 9-volt battery.

   There are some portable TV sets out there, but so far, neither cheap
   enough nor small enough.

References

   1. http://www.9wsyr.com/