W1XBS

I had the opportunity to wander around inside parts of the Empire State Building no one gets to see today.  As part of my job as a television broadcast engineer, I was evaluating it as a potential site. 

This is an article on the state of the antennas in 1967.

RCA Antenna Installed On The Empire State Building, 1946

Here are the pictures of my experience.

This is the obligatory view out the window of the 77th floor.

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With the analog transition passed 3 months away, good old NTSC television is a dying art and this will be yet another area of communications where hams slip into irrelavence.  Sooner than you think, analog televisions will be museum pieces and hardware for NTSC will be increasingly difficult to find. I do believe that manufacturers will continue to include a NTSC tuner for some time to come, as many legacy devices (video games, VCRs, DVDs, etc) will need a way of getting into the TV. Not everyone is comfortable with using the A/V jacks, but I digress.

ATSC is the fancy term for Digital TV, like NTSC is to analog TV. This page will chronicle a project making an inexpensive and repeatable ATSC transmitter for amateur radio.

The requirements for this project are:

• Legal for ham radio.
• Relatively simple, plug and play.
• Low power consumption
• Works on any band (70cm and above)
• Decodable by off the shelf converter boxes (70cm)
• 1 stream (for now), 5 streams ultimately.
• Analog A/V input, SDI and consumer digital eventually.

So with these specifications in mind, we set about to construct this.  The progress of the project can be found on this page.