FW: DVB-T Dongle

[William Fenn]

Chip,

How well I remember that camera.  Do you remember the movie that aired
through the Comark TX over and over and over and over and over and over?  I
will give you a hint, it stared Omar Sharif and a whole lot of camels.  Boy
was I sick of that movie.

Do you remember the 9 X 16 ratio monitor that you viewed yourself on while
walking by the racks toward the camera.  It cost a fortune and contained a
vacuum tube for display (it was also pretty darned heavy).  If you were in
the station at the very early stages you would have walked by the three
racks that contained the Zenith Encoder.  These racks were later moved into
the area that MSTV occupied across from the bathrooms in the rear hallway.

The first real commercial program to air through the Comark TX was "Meet the
Press".  John Glen's spaceflight in the shuttle was also aired.  I don't
think there were too many folks who got to watch these programs because the
hardware (a.k.a. TV Sets) was super expensive and very few (I mean VERY FEW)
folks had an HDTV Set.  Yes, believe it or not, there were a couple of
viewers out there in those days.

Bill
N$TS




-----Original Message-----
From: tacos-bounces+bfenn=cox.net at amrad.org
[mailto:tacos-bounces+bfenn=cox.net at amrad.org] On Behalf Of Chip Fetrow
Sent: Sunday, May 19, 2013 2:26 AM
To: tacos at amrad.org
Subject: Re: DVB-T Dongle

That wasn't THAT early.  The first HDTV camera I saw in the wild (not  
at NAB) was at NBC and it cost a cool $1M on its own.

I got shot by it, and later got to see me walking down the hall.  Nice  
video, odd subject.

--chip

On May 18, 2013, at 1:00 PM, tacos-request at amrad.org wrote:

> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 17 May 2013 16:50:09 -0400
> From: <wb4jfi at knology.net>
> To: "Rob Seastrom" <rs at seastrom.com>
> Cc: tacos at amrad.org
> Subject: Re: DVB-T Dongle
> [...]
> How much did those router cards cost?  To an early adopter DTV  
> station, just
> the HD encoder cost well over half a million dollars each.  The  
> costs of an
> early adopter DTV station was typically between $3.5 million and  
> over ten
> million, for only the transmission systems, no HD production  
> included.  Much
> of that equipment did not last its capital depreciation cycle.  "Early
> adopter" was an official term from the FCC, BTW.
> Terry, WB4JFI
_______________________________________________
Tacos mailing list
Tacos at amrad.org
https://amrad.org/mailman/listinfo/tacos