A few posts up I mentioned BAI had taken over maintenance for WIN TV & DDA Networks, well I’ve just found out that BTS Networks no longer exists, some staff now work for BAI & BAI now looks after all Prime7 transmission maintenance too.
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WIN’s cleaning house.
Never knew solar panels were a source of TV interference
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Yep, can be quite a problem, not just your neighbours (as the headline says) but your own solar panels are more of a problem.
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I never thought of that. I’ve got an aerial shooting over the panels on my roof… sadly both need the northly aspect…
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Sorry to chime in quite late on this, but I only just saw the post. I got out of the broadcast industry towards the start of the year but have heard quite a bit about the changes from various contacts. Having been through a couple redundancies myself and with a lack of any media coverage of the changes I have opted to keep quiet about it while it played out as a courtesy to those affected, many of whom were professional colleagues at one time or another.
My understanding of events is this:
- Early in the year Prime explored options for moving away from DDA for distribution. Telstra made an offer for DVN distribution with a sweetener of a very attractive price for playout on top. Telstra were in the process of acquiring Deluxe’s MediaCloud playout at the time, and Prime’s contract with MediaHub was due to expire at the end of this year.
- At the same time, BAI have been keen to get more clients on board. Prime moving away from both MediaHub and DDA gets them away from complicated relationships with businesses controlled in some way by WIN. Moving maintenance to BAI completes this. I understand it to be cheaper too.
- To avoid the costs of the ongoing contract with BTS, Prime opted to dissolve the business. WIN (and subsidiary DDA) couldn’t see a financial case to keep BTS running on their own and joined Prime in signing with BAI for maintenance.
- WIN and Prime maintenance shifted to BAI at roughly the same time, although BAI and Prime were working on the transition before WIN came to the table.
- Prime’s playout switch from MediaHub to MediaCloud was completed a bit over a week ago. The transition from DDA to DVN is still in progress (it requires physical cabling at transmitter sites so it makes sense it would be a slower process)
Given Seven’s renewed interest in buying Prime, I have to wonder if the complicated relationships with WIN had been making Seven reluctant to have another go at buying Prime while those relationships were in place. The joint venture Ten affiliates in Mildura and WA are a simple affair in comparison.
It’s remarkable how quickly transmitter maintenance services have been consolidated. Two years and six months ago I was regularly on the phone with SCA-employed broadcast techs and the occasional BTS tech, with just a small inkling of change in the air. Now they’re gone and it’s all up to BAI and to a lesser extent TXA. Incredible.
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I am long out of the industry myself but it would be interesting to see if there is even a viable technical workforce left to do broadcasting RF work now?
I got out years ago because they were pushing the techs to do pyramid subcontracting, supply own vehicle and not be fully compensated for the cost and do 24x7x365 on call etc. They were also bringing in foreign techs and engineers which would have had the brakes put on it by COVID. Very few new techs have been trained up in recent years too and a lot of the older techs would now have been able to retire and farewell things like phone calls at all hours, steep unmaintained dirt tracks up mountains in the wet, callouts to sites 5 hours drive from home and transmitter sites that have had nothing spent on them in 30 years.
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Sounds like you’ve got quite a few stories in that paragraph.
I have had a good read through the green paper, and FTV also put together a very detailed report about the cons of selling off the 600mhz spectrum, leaving only channels 6-12 and UHF 28-39 for free to air tv.
In relation to Sharing multiplexes, submissions from the broadcasters are against the proposal of the ABC and SBS sharing one multiplex and the commercial networks two.
Since we are only going to use DvB-tv1 with MPEG 4 this will result in reduced picture quality, and less channels. I see one of the solutions could be to drop the SD simulcast of the HD channels and get rid off the info commercial datacast channels, but the commercials channels obviously use these channels to print money.
Free tv’s report focused heavily on the overlap markets of the Central and Gold Coasts, with the reduction of frequencies there will be insufficient frequencies for local breakaway feeds of NBN / 9 Gold Coast etc.
Also more SFN would be required increasing mush zones.
If dvb-tv2 HVEC was to be implemented and broadcasters where to share multiplex’s there would be more available bandwidth allowing equivalent picture quality and number of channels to be broadcast, this could also be achieving by dropping the SD simulcast of the HD channels.
The report also said that with dvb-tv2 SFN could be used over larger areas and the mush zones can be better managed.
With theses options we are not going to see 4K tv, and it looks like dvb-tv will become a race to the bottom like dab+ with the broadcasters focusing on their streaming service with potential 4K tv streams.
Alternatively, I mentioned in another thread we could remove the spare channels from block b / C / D /E and go into the CB band 21-27 to reclaim frequencies, UK used 21-28, and NZ 25-28. TV firmware would need updating and a UHF antenna that goes down to UHF 21 would also be needed. We can then sell off the 600mhz band to the telcos.
The most likely scenario will be the tv networks reject the proposal or a change of government abolished this, Michelle Rowland is very against the Green Paper.
Please move this to the Digital Tv technical thread as we have gone off track, also sorry about the length of this post.
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We’ll Write to the Federal Government about this DVB-T2 Matter.
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Wouldn’t using MPEG 4 mean you wouldn’t need SD simulcasts anyway, as I’ve never heard of any MPEG4 capable receivers that are SD only.
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If you can switch to DVB-T2 and get the per multiplex bitrate up to around 39.5 Mbit/s then you don’t need HEVC.
All you would need to do is drop the SD simulcasts of the HD channels and move the remaining MPEG2 channels to MPEG4.
Then ABC&SBS could share a multiplex, the commercial channels could each get half a multiplex, while one half a multiplex would become the equivalent of the unallocated channel.
What’s more, you could implement the transition to DVB-T2 in stages. Broadcasters could work out which are their lowest priority channels, put them on a shared multiplex, and convert that multiplex to DVB-T2 first, followed by others in succession. This would require a few channel re-orgs and people would have to rescan their TVs and set top boxes several times.
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This might be a question for broadcast-engineers; is there any reason why Australia couldn’t implement a spectrum plan more like NZ’s? We have six** active Muxes paired over 14 UHF Channels (the main one per transmission area and one acting as infill, which becomes the main frequency for the next transmission area, and so on, if you will). Given the proximity of transmitters and topography***, you can set radiation patterns &c, so is there anything stopping Australia from adopting a similar two-pair frequency DTV network? That would give the telcos a bit more spectrum, the TV’s stay on so everyone would be happy, right?
** and a seventh depending on where you live (plus four more allocated but not licensed to anyone at present).
*** don’t worry about population, that’s irrelevant here, we’re looking at broadcast footprints over area.
Not too familiar with NZ TV, but I wonder if in the example of Auckland and Hamilton, is the content on all TV stations in both regions exactly the same eg. same ads, same LCN and network names? And I’m assuming the main Auckland transmitter is strong enough to be received in say Hamilton? If no to either of the above, this could be why the NZ plan works?
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I am not sure about content between Auckland and Hamilton but from viewing NZ tv coverage maps Auckland does not get into Hamilton to very well.
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Highpower Auckland signals are on Ch’s 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38
Highpower Waikato is the same
Infill Hamilton use offset frequencies, Ch’s 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39
Infill Auckland use the frequencies in between too.
They’re staggered like this throughout NZ, and keeps all transmissions in a tidy wee band. You just need to make sure your radiation patterns and power levels are right (so in theory, you’d not have issues with overlapping markets).
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Does that mean Auckland and Waikato are in a SFN?
Not entirely - in Auckland vs. Waikato’s case, for instance, the multiplexes used by TVNZ and (what was) World TV are switched around [a special case for Auckland for some reason, they align in all other regions], other multiplexes are the same.
Plus you have things like local and tourism stations which would only broadcast to one district - looks like some got local multiplexes (the “seventh” one that @TV4 mentions) while others might’ve found space as a locally inserted station on the spare multiplex that Kordia/JDA (site operator, delete as applicable) runs.
Don’t know whether regional feeds (for advertising, regional content mostly went ages ago) have gone any further than the traditional TVNZ “Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin” model and whatever TV3 ended up with - I wouldn’t be surprised if it has given the population of Waikato and Bay of Plenty combined would be larger than the South Island submarkets, but you’d have to ask someone more local.
This table from the Radio Spectrum Management NZ site is a reasonable summary (although it’s June 2019 so it still references Mediaworks for instance, the frequencies wouldn’t have changed).
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One other difference between Australia and NZ is that NZ has (correct me if I’m wrong) less translators than Australia, maybe only a few. So, for example, Queenstown, area population 30,000+, doesn’t have any terrestrial TV transmitters, so people there have to use satellite for TV reception.
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A town the size of Queenstown in Australia would have had a full service terrestrial TV site nearby possibly at a high cost, otherwise the government would get deluged with complaints from residents about having to use satellite kit.
I was surprised that Queenstown only had satellite TV when I was last there but NZ has always had remote places like Milford and Doubtful Sounds that were only ever going to be covered by satellite TV.
Obviously the 30k population in Queenstown wasn’t big enough for anyone to justify a custom TV feed and commercial breaks there. Pity more of Australia didn’t take that approach. NZ’s TV and radio system has always appeared better planned than Australia’s possibly because there were less broadcasters with their fingers in the pie.
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