Christopher Cormier

We send a SD feed to Fayetteville via a large fiber mux sent through Time Warner. Fayetteville not only gets its own morning weather and traffic cameras but also gets localized commercials. Today the audio went out. We checked it on our  side of the mux, audio sounds great. After an hour Time Warner calls back to tell us they are on the backup which is our main feed and appears to be topping out at -20db on the audio. They seem to be satisfied and have headed home. I wonder how much it would take to make them to stick around and work to  reestablish the original feed?

MPH prototype based on LG Voyager

With the onset of the digital television transition it was established that the ATSC standard as it stood was not very forgiving for vehicles in motion. This limited audiences to fixed locations, a big setback from the more forgiving old analog broadcast.

Several contenders tried to fix this shortcoming with the idea of bringing over-the-air broadcasts to smaller handsets including cell phones. The service that seems to have come out on top is called MPH, which stands for Mobile Personal Handheld. MPH is poised to be serious competition for VCast, as well as the other subscription-based mobile TV providers. The MPH service provides free over-the-air broadcasts originating from the same broadcasters who have always provided free TV. The MPH carrier is multiplexed into a broadcaster’s existing ATSC carrier using the Hughes MPH encoder and mux and is a joint venture between LG and Harris.

WRAL, in Raleigh, NC, was one of the first test sites for the MPH service and the only broadcaster currently transmitting the MPH service in the area at the moment. Before NAB this year, WRAL performed demonstrations of its more practical uses by installing a system using the MPH service aboard a Raleigh city bus.

I recently received the latest prototype handset. Based on the existing LG Voyager flip handset this is a vast improvement on earlier designs. I took the handset home to Durham to test its range and performance. The one thing that stood out was how much faster the unit acquired our carrier. From Power ON to TV watching was typically within 15 seconds and starting the TV app was usually just a second or two to get to the program guide which would list the available stations and a few more to acquire and buffer the station you choose. The one upsetting change has been that there is no reliable reception with the antenna retracted.

Heading out to Durham I didn’t experience any drop outs until I reached the I-40/147 interchange which is ripe with terrestrial interference and often affects my Sirius radio as well. However, there was no need to fully extend the antenna until I was deep in Durham. I experienced strong service well into Durham despite being over 30 miles from the transmitter as the crow flies. The reception became a bit spotty inside regardless of the antenna position. The handset seemed to get much better reception in all cases when the antenna was oriented vertically as opposed to horizontally. On the way back into Raleigh the next day I experienced occasional drop outs as I headed towards the transmitter, which seems to corroborate a known issue with Doppler shift. I think a little buffering is likely to cure that (I know, easy to say, a little harder to implement.)

I am rarely an early adopter of technology but I really am encouraged by this prototype and I’m seriously looking forward to the first commercial releases.