HDTV Almanac - Broadcast Battle

[alfredpoor]

You can’t see them. You can’t hear them. You can’t touch them. Yet they are responsible for an enormous amount of our communication and entertainment. Most people would use the general term “radio waves” to refer to that part of the electromagnetic spectrum with wavelengths longer than visible light, but these are also used for [...]

[url=http://www.hdtvmagazine.com/columns/2009/12/hdtv_almanac_broadcast_battle.php]Read Column[/url]

[ccclvib]

...which would put us back to that same old issue: "And when the power goes out." If you have a cell phone, and the power is out at the site your phone uses, what do you do? Particularly, what do you do if your end of that connection is also involved with an emergency? Same can be said for TV broadcasting, of course, but their power is usually even more protected than a cell tower, since there's lots fewer. To the extent most TV/radio broadcast sites usually have a backup generator, where cell sites don't. I'll take my land line phone and the OTA broadcast radio and TV, thank you very much. The rest will be nice, but not absolutely necessary - as it would if I didn't have access to land line and OTA.

[Roger Halstead]

I agree, when the power goes out, or there is a wide spread disaster the cell towers are going to be one of the first pieces of support structure to go. They balked at even having 4 to 8 hours of back up power. I doubt if many have more than a few minutes worth available. Then there is the saturation of the system when it is running. How many times have you heard "All circuits are busy" on a holiday week end, or sometimes just on week ends? They have had to set up priority over rides, or they were going to do so that the reporters couldn't tie up the available lines allowing emergency groups to still get through. Yes, we still have our land lines in addition to the cell phones, but even then there are microwave links on many trunk-lines.

All the gadgets are nice and I tend to be a first, or early adopter, but we need to keep the priorities straight even where both sides have money for their favorite politician's charity. <:-))