Thanks mate.
Yeah, not much to keep the FIFO miners entertained!
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Assuming the HPON is TAB radio?
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That’s my guess.
Yep, confirmed.
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If VAST is the fall back as more remote terrestrial sites potentially get shut down then it needs to have more localism. I’m still a fan of the idea of narrow spot beams that could achieve this nationally.
Shared this previously in the VAST thread.
With this method I’d like to see all regional broadcasters on VAST - not just the Remote Central and Eastern Australia licensees.
Better still hopefully this occurs in an MPEG-4 only environment terrestrially. Meaning this version of VAST could then be used to feed the existing terrestrial sites across all of regional Australia (with no down scaling from MPEG-4 to MPEG-2) reducing costs for microwave links and the need for the WIN-owned DDA company.
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I believe this is actually the plan (from what I’ve heard, anyway), that is to stop all terrestrial broadcasts in regional Australia and configure VAST to broadcast the localised channels in each area. Hence the tests I mentioned earlier. This is recent stuff they’ve done.
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Sounds like they’ve copied it from the Canucks! Satellite and cable is the only way most people outside of large cities get the CBC and Radio Canada, and CTV are shutting down most repeater stations.
Hope they’re prepared for the “outrage” caused by people having to spend money on satellite dishes and more set top boxes! 
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i’m pretty sure this would of happened when AUSSAT launched
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The idea has merit. I just don’t know if such a move would be a final nail in the coffin for regional linear TV. Every TV in regional Australia would need a set top box and every household a dish. Who pays for that? Could it be subsidised? And is the cost of a brand new satellite and ongoing transmission costs going to be cheaper than current land based transmission?
All VAST boxes are capped at around $280. That’s a price someone in rural Australia is willing to pay. They are used to utilities, fuel, services being higher. But would every resident of Newcastle, for example, be happy with that?
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you could think about how many houses may still have a Austsar/Foxtel dish still sitting as well
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Who owns them? Everyone gets away with using them, but I think you’ll find Foxtel own those dishes in most cases. They tell you to leave them when you move and utilise them when new customers want to connect.
There are customers that want to take their dish with them?!?
Of course. Just like there are FTTP customers that want to take the NBN modem with them. Foxtel keeps track of premises that already have a dish, but have no idea when someone takes it. Much to their surprise when the next guy tries to get connected and the dish is no longer there!
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I think you’d just see a slow erosion of translator stations, while the high powered main sites would stay on for longer.
I think to some extent digital was overbuilt, that because a few people who had bad analogue fell off the digital cliff, they added lots of marginal sites to try and make the transition smoother. It’s obvious that’s uneconomic - especially with general declines.
I’d think there’s plenty of people who could just put up a bigger antenna, and get from a main site - rather than it being straight to sat.
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I believe it would be much cheaper. Instead of maintaining lots of transmitters, they just need to pay for equipment space in Belrose and the bandwidth on the satellite.
It would go on the existing Aurora Digital platform, as far as I know.
People wont bother to changeover (and for all sorts of reasons) especially given that you can stream basically the same services (+ more)
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Does the existing Aurora Digital have capacity?
Anyway, you just can’t ignore that such a change would render every TV tuner in regional Australia as useless. It would cost households hundreds of dollars to just watch FTA. It would kill regional FTA for good.
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Not sure what their current capacity is, though I do think there’s enough to do this. They just need to allocate more room for VAST and and less for narrowcasters and other services on there.
But, yes, I agree, it would kill FTA regionally, unless the government does some sort of switchover subsidy program like with the digital switchover. It wouldn’t be something that’s short term, but rather long term.
IIRC the number of new VAST installations per month is around 2000 homes. Not kidding. It used to be much higher.
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Some public television stations in the US are doing datacasting trials. Using the station’s ATSC digital transmission schools are sending files to students who otherwise don’t have internet access.
The pilot project in South Carolina:
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