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All posts by Trevor Harris

Below are all of Trevor Harris's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.


@George Buchanan

George I did not mean to sujest that I was against regional HD it is just the way the BBC is implementing it.

The BBC still does not have a viable stratergy for regional HD. As far as I know there are no plans to provide regional HD. The BBC is simply not wanting to spend the money on more transponders or on converting regional studios to HD.

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Very brave of Ofcom who clearly believe that the BBC will still exist in 2026. Our hotel room in Italy only had 2 English channels and they were BBC 1 and BBC 2. We soon realised how awfuly it was to be restricted to those 2 channels. 80% of the programing was house hunting or antique shows. Most of the rest was absolutly mind numbing.

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@Charles Stuart

You are correct that if DAB was run at 256kbs as originally intended it could reach FM quality. But there are other inherent weaknesses in DAB. The error correction is very weak and so many listeners experience the famous warbling effect. It also uses a higher frequency than FM which makes indoor reception difficult without an external aerial. DAB does not support a trafic service like FM so FM remains the system of choice for in car listening. Another problem with DAB is that we have just about reached the limit of transmitter density which make it more and more difficult to fill in the areas with poor reception.

The biggest problem with DAB is that most people don't want it. As has been pointed out many comercial stations only continue with DAB to preserve thier FM licences.

The BBC is now stuck with this white elephant. They can't turn it off as as there are too many listeners on DAB. At the same time there are not enough listeners to switch FM off for the national stations.

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@Mark

It is true that some recievers will only support up to 192kbs but the DAB spec goes up to 256kbs so those recievers are sub standard.

The BBC has consistantly said they will not be moving to DAB+. There are now too many DAB only recievers to switch in the forseeable future.

I forgot to mention the biggest reason the national FM stations cannot be switched off is car radios.



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@Mike

Actually the new MPEG H265 codec is expected to double the compression rate compared with H264.

I don't think that Ultra HD is going to be viable on terestrial. Just look at the problems they are having with HD. It is going to be along time before any free to air company will be able to provide a Ultra HD service.

Satallite has always seemed to me to be the future of television. Satallite already has 65 HD channels and one 3D channel. The extra 24 HD channels for the Olympics demonstrated the superiority of Satellite.

Of course Fibre to the Home could provide these services but BT has been pushing Fibre to the Box which can only be a short term statergy.

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I think the digital space would be better utilised by having BBC 3 & 4 in HD.

As for the RED button service we see the continuing decline in the BBC.

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Actually all the video recorders I have had had a stereo hifi track. In fact I still have a SVHS recorder with stereo hifi sound. This system used 2 fm carriers to record high quality stereo. The sound quality was very good 20hz to 20khz with a signal to noise ratio of 70 db and so was better than nicam. Most pre-recorded videos had a stereo track aswell as a mono track to keep compatability with old recorders. Beta recorders also used a similar system.

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Actually it was not only teletext that was transmitted in this way. It was also used commercially for data broadcasting. This was used by betting shops to receive racing information. One betting shop used a system called Naplps which was a more advanced videotext system. It could also control the televisions in the shop.

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What amazes me is that Ofcom did not insist that Local broadcasting should be in HD at least on satellite. HD has become the norm for millions of viewers and yet we are going to have to put up with an obsolete system for years to come.

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