[Scott Dorsey]

philper wrote:
In the motion picture and video audio businesses, VHF wireless has not
been used in any professional sense in many years. I don't work in
sound reinforcement or theatrical audio but I haven't seen any VHF
units in their racks in the last 8 years or so either. Lectrosonics
may still make one model of VHF wireless, but that design is from the
late 1980s, is not diversity, not frequency agile, has none of the
scanning capabilities of modern wirelesses and is mic-level out only.

Yes absolutely. (By the way, diversity helps the multipath issues with
VHF stuff a lot.. it's more of a win at VHF than at UHF). My point was
mostly that there is a huge amount of old obsolete VHF stuff still in
regular use out there.

It is not a viable alternative to a 411a system. For the statement
that "Ch. 2-14 will be available for wireless mic use" to have any
meaning there has to be equipment in that range available to end
users.

Maybe it means I'll be able to sell these first generation Lectro IFB
kits that are cluttering up my garage?

In any case, as I've aid many times, the end users will be
screwed by this because they will have to re-buy all the gear they
presently use and will not be able to sell their current gear except
for salvage value.

Sure, but folks should have expected and planned for that. My worry is
more that the stuff down on the lower bands will become an interference
problem as well (note my later correction that the higher powered
"white space" devices can use the VHF band).

The above-700MHz closeout is just the warmup for
what's to come.

I don't think so... I think the TV broadcasters would howl if any more
cutting was done. What you are seeing here is a change that has been
nearly 20 years in planning and it is the result of an extreme change
in transmission technology. This is a more significant change to the
TV band than the 1954 addition of the color carriers... it's more like
the dramatic format change that they went through in the sixties in the UK.

What the wireless people are seeing is just a tiny little corner of a huge
change, and it's a change that was made without thinking much about the
wireless users. But it's a big change, the kind that comes once in a
generation.

The push for this new "white space" service is something that was not
planned, and was basically railroaded into the system by political
interests at the last minute. And that's bad, but it's a push that came
about because some people with more money than sense saw the dramatic shift
in the broadcast service and thought they could take advantage of it.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."