[geeks] Hello?

[wa2egp at att.net]

> The European cellphone market is considerably different to the US
> market so what little I know may not apply 'over there', but I don't
> believe the switch from analog to digital mobile phones was made to
> improve quality but to improve security and capacity ... I'm doubtful
> that analog cellphones could cope with the market size that exists now.

Over here, the big problem was that anyone could listen to any radio signal
as long as they didn't make money from it and they did not give the intended
recipient the message first (basis of the Communications Act of 1934). The
way they make cell phones secure was to ban the manufactoring of receivers
that can receive in that receive in the cell phone frequency band.  You could
still build your own though.  A little hard to do with digital and spread
spectrum technology.

> Incidentally I recall from ages ago that some European mobile phone
> operators deliberately turn down the audio quality by default with an
> incantation available from the phone to turn it back up again. Not that
> I bothered trying it or remembering anything about it.
> 
> As for broadcast digital media, one thing that that is obvious on the
> UK's DTTV service (Freeview) is that some broadcasters would rather
> reduce quality to get more channels ... the quality of the main
> channels including the BBC is *far* higher than the junk channels.

That was also one of the "problems" with HDTV in the U.S., bandwidth.
For a while, there was an idea that chanels 2-13 would "go dark" and
that band would be reassigned to another service and the stations
would move to a UHF band.  Obviously, they figured a way out of that
problem.  HDTV did not take off the way it was expected (and hyped).

On a different note: Man-made geysers in NYC.  What will they think 
of next? 

Bob