Trip

I'm going to have to try to check on my phone later, but that SID matches the Sprint Culpeper area SID. I feel like that BSID looks familiar too. - Trip

Regarding the earlier discussion of 3G speeds, in the DC area, 3G speeds are very usable outside of Metro tunnels. I dropped US Cellular (roaming on Verizon) because the Verizon 3G that US Cellular would roam on was essentially unusable. By comparison, Sprint 3G never leaves me disappointed above ground. - Trip

In a followup to the FCC decision I posted about Arizona public safety a few weeks ago, here's the FCC dismissing a petition for reconsideration: http://bit.ly/1bXL4wk - Trip

I looked at the Shentel region in MD, WV, and VA this morning, and I didn't see many remaining Nextel towers that would really add much to Shentel's coverage in the area. Maybe 2 or 3 tops. Shentel just has so many towers in the region that it is either on the same tower that Nextel used to be on or on a different one within a stone's throw in almost every case. - Trip

I enabled the free international roaming on my plan and my work may be sending me to Mexico City this month. If they do, I'll post a report. (Last time, I left my phone in airplane mode the entire time I was there.) - Trip

To answer your first question, local TV stations broadcast on VHF or UHF channels covering a local area. This includes your local ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX/PBS/CW/Univision/Telemundo/etc. As you suggest, satellite also uses spectrum but at much higher frequencies. Dish/DirecTV use frequencies at 12 GHz or so, generally, though there are other bands as well, and that's above the desired range of wireless companies because it really doesn't penetrate buildings well. I will point out the military also uses a lot of satellite spectrum and so that spectrum will not be going away any time soon. So, a few points. First, this is already being done on a free market style basis; this auction is what I was hired for by the FCC. There's a thread somewhere on here about the 600 MHz auction, and you can read a short 1-paragraph summary of the FCC Incentive Auction here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Milgrom#FCC_Incentive_Auctions Also more information here: https://www.fcc.gov/incentiveauctions Second, in your scenario, who pays for the 30 million people who do not have cable TV to have cable TV or Internet service able to handle TV service? What about the millions more on satellite who go from 3 competitive choices in TV service to 1? What about in rural areas where fast Internet or even cell service of any kind may not be available, do those people just go back to the 1800s with no services at all? In an emergency where the local cable and local cell towers go out (think earthquakes, hurricanes, etc), where do people go without over-the-air TV to fall back on? Are you the politician who would go on TV and say, "yep, we're taking away the TV and emergency information from the poor, but not to worry, you can spend $80/mo or more you don't have on a phone instead!" And piss off the local TV stations that will make or break your campaign? In my opinion, broadcast TV is the most efficient visual distribution system ever seen on Earth. It scales infinitely since it's not a one-to-one link, can be pulled out of the air for free with minimal equipment and effort, and due to there being at least some diversity of transmit locations and the relatively low expense involved in making a single facility per station redundant rather than hundreds or thousands of cell sites, it's extremely dependable in emergencies. And don't forget, as people cut the cord with cable, over-the-air usage is going up. Do you think it's a good idea to kill off a growing industry, especially when it killing it mainly serves to benefit the cable monopoly that everyone hates? I also didn't hear you address the million(s) of people who depend on satellite Internet. Would you cut them off? They deal with very, very low data caps, would they not be able to get TV over the internet after a few hours of usage each month? Just things to think about. And welcome to the forum, by the way. - Trip

Who needs a filter? Once the cable company goes all digital and removes the analog channels, they are allowed to encrypt every channel on the system (including locals) so no filter is required. - Trip

If I were to guess, T-Mobile is probably just going to cover the interstates and have token coverage to keep roaming costs down without pushing hard to actually gain customers in the state. West Virginia, I'm learning, is a really tough state to cover, with both AT&T and Verizon having huge coverage holes in the state--some areas having no service at all--and I can imagine T-Mobile not wanting to get stuck trying to fight a losing battle. - Trip

Good evening, all. I accepted Robert's invitation to join the family here because I love everything that this site stands for and am glad to contribute what I can. - Trip

Here at my desk at work, I usually sit on B26 or Clear B41 from a site at least 6 blocks away. The one right across the street is very weak and around the corner from where my office is. Suddenly, this morning, I connected to a new B25 site. I'm guessing it's either this building or the one next door (which was "B25 Accepted" a long time ago but I have never seen live). It's still preferring B41 from the more distant site when it can see it, which is the correct choice in my mind, but when that's too weak, I'm holding B25 now at something like -80 instead of falling to 3G from the building's DAS. - Trip

http://bit.ly/1HKvlgg - Trip

I'm not even referring to DX. Washington DC is entirely within the WWMX contour, but you can't hear it in DC because of the WJFK IBOC. - Trip

In DC, with a good receiver, WWMX 106.5 in Baltimore should be receivable. When WJFK turns off the IBOC for a sports game, it can be heard very clearly. As soon as WJFK turns the IBOC back on, WWMX gets crushed under the noise. Similarly, see WWWT on 107.7 and WLZL on 107.9, who in my neck of the woods anyway, have a nice battle over which one is usable on any given day (not that I listen to either one). - Trip

Depends on what problem you're trying to solve. US radio stations liked IBOC because they held the patents and it prevented new competitors from being licensed. DAB needed new frequencies. Most of Europe cleared what is the upper-VHF TV band in the US (174-216 MHz) in going color or going digital, and so they used that frequency for digital radio. In Canada, they used L-band which is reserved in the US for military uses and is of such a high frequency that in many of the rough terrain parts of the country it wouldn't work very well. I haven't seen it first-hand, but everything I've read is that FMeXtra was probably the best option. To heavily simplify, you'd basically replace the stereo part of an FM transmission with a digital carrier, so there would be no adjacent sidebands. You'd give up the stereo in favor of mono on the analog side but have digital audio essentially anywhere you currently have stereo with similar throughput to IBOC. On AM, which I forgot to mention earlier, IBOC basically just narrows the FM version and slaps it on the sides of the AM signal. It works about as poorly as you might expect. But unlike IBOC on FM, the bleed over is a lot worse, usually taking up two or three adjacent frequencies on each side, ruining the band at night. They're talking about going all-digital on AM to try to help revitalize the band. Of course, if you're going to do that, you might as well use DRM, which is used on shortwave with supposedly great results. I have not seen DRM first-hand either, though I would definitely like to. - Trip

In the DC area, the radio is really awful (though WIYY in Baltimore has gotten a LOT better lately). Whenever I go to the beach, I spend the entire time on WZBH in Georgetown, quite possibly one of my favorite radio stations anywhere. I'm really hoping the new ownership doesn't ruin it. Regarding "HD Radio," transitioning over to it full time would probably accomplish nothing except killing off radio for good. It works poorly and doesn't live up to any of its promises, really. The "HD Radio" name originally didn't mean anything; they came up with it to ride on the hype of HDTV. (Only later did people figure out it could mean "Hybrid Digital.") It was called "IBOC" before then, meaning "In Band On Channel" but in reality, it was more like "In Band Adjacent Channel." For a station on 107.7, for example, the analog signal consumes roughly 200 kHz from 107.6 to 107.8. The HD sidebands each eat another 200 kHz from 107.5 to 107.6 and from 107.8 to 107.9, meaning that if you have an adjacent channel FM, that station gets stepped on. (In the DC area, there are quite a few of these.) In the event the analog is turned off, the IBOC spec essentially calls for the now-freed 200 kHz in the middle to become a secondary and much weaker expansion of the digital signal. As best I can tell, the IBOC spec contains no way to take what are currently the two 100 kHz sidebands and turn them into a single 200 kHz carrier in the middle of the channel if the analog was killed off. Ibiquity claimed the system would operate successfully at -20dBc (1% of analog), but in practice, that turned out to be way too weak. They sought a power increase to -10 dBc (10% of analog) but that would have caused so much interference that the FCC only granted a power increase to -14 dBc (4% of analog) with a complex waiver process to go up to -10 dBc. Of course, it means that they will have to rebuild and install new transmitters and other gear to make it happen--practically starting over from scratch to get that relatively small increase in power. On top of all that, the delay on the transmit side is a huge issue. One of the few places where radio seems to continue to be in decent shape is with sports broadcasts. Well, if you're broadcasting live sports in-market, you have to turn the IBOC off because the delay is so bad that in a baseball game, by the time you heard the audio of the ball being hit on the radio, the play would be over. A lot of people bring radios to sporting events to listen to the live broadcast while it's going on, and because you have to delay the analog audio to match the delay of the IBOC, you have to turn the IBOC off and kill the delay if you want it to be usable in that case. Can you tell I don't like it much? - Trip

That's definitely the case, as best I can tell. I've seen numbers matching that pattern for nTelos in FAA registrations all over their coverage area. (AT&T uses a similar scheme, but also uses an integer number, depending on what information I'm looking at. I'm not entirely sure why there appear to be two different ID numbers for each tower site with AT&T.) That's definitely what it would look like. - Trip

The numbers aren't necessarily specific depending on what you search for and whatnot. The location named "The Meadows" covers all three of the specific towers I pointed out. - Trip

In my research on that tower, I concluded that Verizon, T-Mobile, and US Cellular were the companies on it. AT&T and Nextel were on a nearby utility pole (behind the recycling center) but the two were so close together that AT&T and T-Mobile could have been reversed. nTelos was on a different utility pole near the off-ramp from US-250 East onto Grove Road. My guess is that it's US Cellular. - Trip

Better service in the stations, which does NOT require any track closings, would be an amazing start. Wish they could at least do that much! My phone only works about 1/3 of the time when I'm waiting for a train at L'enfant, the transfer point where five of six Metro lines meet. That is not acceptable, by any stretch of the imagination. Last time I was there, Farragut North had no service at all! Getting LTE into the stations, or even just properly functioning 3G, would be a vast improvement over right now. - Trip

I sat right next to Joan! - Trip

There are two distinct issues here, and Robert touched on both of them. For those interested, I'll do a deeper dive. (I sat in on the AT&T ex parte last week.) Recall that the auction is voluntary and as such depends on broadcasters participating in order to clear spectrum. Now, suppose that nobody in, say, Boston participates in the auction, but the rest of the country has great broadcaster participation. One of two things can happen, either the auction fails because even though you could clear spectrum in the rest of the nation there was no way to clear it in Boston, or you sell the rest of the country and leave TV stations in what becomes the wireless band in the rest of the country. The FCC has opted to go in the latter direction, and adopted the aforementioned ISIX methodology to determine such interference. This is not what the AT&T filing was about. The AT&T ex parte is about the issue that we do have neighbors to the north and south who may not necessarily clear spectrum in 600 MHz at the same time as us. Negotiations are on-going and confidential at this time, so people are assuming the worst case scenario: that those TV stations will remain there. AT&T conducted this analysis to look at what kind of impairment US wireless licensees in 600 MHz would experience if all of the Canadian and Mexican TV stations did not move. It turns out the answer is "quite a bit," as their analysis shows. Much of that impairment is from Mexico and into Los Angeles, which should come as no surprise. Of course, all involved are hoping that the negotiations turn out well and it's not an issue. AT&T's ex parte filing is here, for anyone who wants to read it: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/comment/view?id=60001029063 Hopefully that clarifies things a bit. I can also answer some questions, though I'm not the expert on this issue. - Trip

The incentive auction is a reverse auction plus a forward auction, both parts put together. So he's referring to both. - Trip

My fiancee and I went down there after work today and it worked well enough to use Google Maps. I was connected to DC03XC441. - Trip

In Farmville? Farmville is Sprint territory. - Trip

Well, maybe not so surprising. A week ago or so, when I reported the site was live, I could barely get it below the -90 dBm necessary for a report to be accepted. This morning on my way in, I saw -76 dBm while casually walking by the building. So I'm guessing they turned it up by at least 10 dB. - Trip