NAB Sponsored State-of-the-Art Antenna Research for "Rabbit Ear" Replacement

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http://www.marcus-spectrum.com/Blog/files/FASTROAD%20antenna.html

NAB Sponsored State-of-the-Art Antenna Research for "Rabbit Ear" Replacement
September 30, 2010 10:23 PM

On August 17, NAB unveiled an impressive high tech report they had commissioned from a not well known, but very well qualified military contractor on a possible replacement for the ubiquitous “rabbit ears” used in houses that depend on over-the-air reception. It is commendable that in an effort to reverse the decline in over-the-air viewers NAB this time decided to pay for good engineering rather than the usual lawyers and lobbyists.

You blogger noticed during multiple visits to Japan during the analog TV era that actual TV reception in Japanese homes was almost always much better than in US homes even though both countries used the same NTSC transmission system. Multiple inquiries revealed a tentative conclusion that Japanese homeowners buy new TV sets every few years from a neighborhood dealer (denkiyasan) and that as part of the package they get professional installation and maintenance of an outdoor antenna. Americans, by contrast, usually buy TVs from a large store which at best offers delivery to the doorstep and thus rely on either poorly maintained outdoor antennas or “rabbit ears”. Of course, many Americans used CATV but until those systems started having major fiber optic components in the past few years, users several amplifiers away from the cable headend were at the mercy of their cable company’s maintenance schedule. (Lack of attention to amplifier gain adjustments resulted in overloading of later amplifiers and generation of intermodulation distortion in the system, degrading the delivered picture quality. These problems generally disappear in systems with a fiber optics backbone.) Now with DTV, over-the-air viewers don’t see a “snowy” signal, but due to the “cliff effect” you may not see any signal at all! Thus winning back over-the-air viewers needs simple but effective home antenna technology.

MegaWave Corp., of Devens, MA had done a study for NAB in 1995 on available antenna technology for improved set top performance and NAB’s FASTROAD (Flexible Advanced Services for Television & Radio On All Devices) program, a technology advocacy program, hired them again to survey new antenna technology and the opportunities resulting from decreased TV band spectrum. (MegaWave’s hometown is next to Ft. Devens, for many years a major Army Security Agency installation. So it can be surmised that they have dealt with “3 letter agencies” other than FCC.)

The report is fascinating for us techies, reviewing all sorts of interesting antenna technologies not well known outside of antenna researchers and the military industrial complex. The pictures at the top of this post shows one antenna they spent a lot of effort exploring and its performance.

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