San Francisco broadcast TV spectrum analyzer tour

Nick looks at selected chunks of the broadcast TV spectrum with a spectrum analyzer.

Incidentally, I mis-identified KBWB analog 20 / digital 19 as KOFY in the video. That was their old call sign many years ago.

UPDATE! Ironically, since I wrote that, it appears that KBWB may have now reverted to their old KOFY callsign.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• TV
• spectrum
• analyzer

[Amishman35]

How did you manage to upload a video over 10 minutes long??

I finally got to see the spectrum of a digital television signal..thanks! Excellent video about a spectrum analyzer. 5 stars.

[nsayer]

You can be a "director" or some such by going through some extra hoops. If you do that, you can upload long videos.

[uploadJ]

An 8590 series with the bezel around the CRT removed - I didn't recognized the HP series until a little ways into the vid!

[nsayer]

You're right. I bought it used on eBay. It seems accurate enough, but has a bit of screen burn and the power switch is a bit touchy. I didn't even notice the missing screen bezel until you said so.

[nsayer]

Any time a channel shifts from VHF to UHF (which is more or less unprecedented, of course, but still) it's DXability is going to go down. But the biggest change is that in the analog days, you could get by with a less than perfect picture and still get the sound. Sometimes you might even lose the chroma but still get a monochrome picture that was ok. With the digital cliff effect, you get all or nothing. And the threshold for reception is fairly high - as I measured it, it's about 10 dB S/N.

[cdltpx]

@Amishman35 YT will authorize you to do so I have been allowed to do so but I think that mainly because I refuse the partnership offer and they know I am not a copyright whore. YT was a great idea until the commercialization of it all.This is a great way to learn if they would leave peoples audio intact when they may have some questionable audio. Trust if someone wants to get WBM they can if they tried half as hard to get it. One day they just told me I am able to make longer videos.

[k6mfw]

This is very educational for us to see what the spectrum looks like (vs artwork). Since you took this before the DTV transition, we can see how ATSC compares to NTSC. Also useful was the Ch 17 spectrum to get a picture of the noise floor (monitoring multitudes were always curious what it really is).

Phone ringing in background reminds me of 16 mm film of Richard Feynman demonstrating electromagnetism. You can hear a phone ring, someone answers, Feynman says, "take a message, I'm busy!"

[Yavor54]

Way to go Nick- 5 stars... now I know what DTV looks like. Got an analyzer coming in tomorrow..Ebay of course! Hope is it alive when it arrives. I thought we should have a formal funeral for NTSC at some point. Dang, all the many years of dealing with that signal! 8VSB ATV ehh? How you going to do that?

Thanks again - AB5N Bob

[jaybee1973jaybee]

Does anyone know how the digital transition will affect "DX-ing"? With many of the VHF affiliates (ch. 2 through 13) shifting to UHF digital signals, the range of the television stations seems to be diminished. As I child, I enjoyed occasional glimpses of KHSL-TV (ch. 12) from Chico from the eastern outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area. KSBW-TV came in strong on most days. Analog Sacramento stations came in very well. But now reception for Sacramento digital stations is very poor.