There seems to be a lot of confusion and frustration concerning the change from analog to digital television? Understanding what DTV is and how it differs from analog may help reduce some of the confusion and knowing the benefits hopefully will reduce the frustration.

The easiest way to define the difference between digital and analog is by saying digital has a specific number of possibilities and analogue has infinite possibilities.

Think of children on a play ground. First they decide to play hopscotch. The hopscotch course requires each child to jump from one square to another. The child on the course will have a certain number of squares in which he or she must move by jumping or hopping. As the child is going from one square to the other the child can not decide to stop. There are just so many hops up and so many hops back. That is digital.

Next the children decide to have a race. The race has a starting point and an ending point. As a child runs that child can increase speed, decrease speed, or stop at any point. The child can take long strides, short steps, or anything in between. There are infinite possibilities as to the number of steps the child can make or the length of time it takes the child to complete the course. That is analog.

Another example is a light switch. When a person walks into a room and turns on a light it is usually done by switching a toggle on the wall which has just two positions either on or off. Some times there are light switches which give the options of high, low and off or maybe even high, medium, low or off. That is digital because there are a limited number of possibilities.

There are some light controls which contain a rheostat that allows the user to move from dim to bright in a smooth flow with infinite possibilities where the user can stop the movement. That is analog

When Television first started broadcasting in the 1940's it was analog and every station had the same format for placing the picture and the sound on their assigned frequencies of operation (channels) so all standard TV sets could work with all standard TV broadcasts.

In the 1950's color was added to the broadcast but the same black and white format was still used with the addition of color information which could be interpreted by those TV's which were designed to receive color pictures while not changing the quality of those TV's that were designed to operate on black and white. So if a television set was purchased in 1950 and was still working in the year 2000 it used the same format as a new TV set purchased that year. In those 50 years technology has experienced enormous changes.

When the analog television transmitter was turned on it continued to transmit a signal until it was shut down. The picture portion of an analogue broadcast is sent in frames so it paints a picture on the television screen then it erases that picture and paints a new picture 60 times every second. During this whole process the transmitter signal stayed on. The audio portion was sent in a constant stream.

With digital broadcast all of the information needed to paint the picture on the TV screen is processed into digital binary codes (binary means two states usually expressed as on and off, high and low, or 0 and 1) which are compressed and sent as a burst. These bursts of information are called packets.

The audio is also packaged up in packets and sent with the picture packets.

This means the transmitter only needs to radiate a signal while a packet is being sent then it can shut off its transmission until another packet is ready to be sent. While that transmitter is off another near by transmitter can send a packet and thus two or three transmitters can operate in the same area on the same frequency and not interfere with each other. An analog broadcast only allows one transmitter on a frequency or channel in a given area.

So DTV allows more transmitting stations to be operated in a given area while transmitting a higher quality program format. The increased program format allows much larger TV screens to be used without a significant deterioration of quality.

The move to DTV will also open the old VHF TV spectrums for other communications. Digital voice communications can use as many as 5 transmitters transmitting 5 different messages operating in the same location while taking up only 10 KHz (10,000 Hertz) of the radio frequency spectrum. An analog TV broadcast uses 5 MHz (5,000,000 Hertz) of the radio frequency spectrum. So in the space of one television station 2,500 voice communication stations can operate. There were 12 channels assigned to VHF TV which means this change will allow up to 30,000 different voice communications to operate at the same time in a given area which had previously been restricted to television broadcasting. Data communications takes up much less radio spectrum thus even more such stations could be used at the same time.

Freeing up these TV channels will allow more room for public service such as police and fire radios to operate along with other government and private entities. The change will allow many more TV stations to be operating simultaneously potentially increasing the number of programs the public can watch while not paying the cost of cable or satellite TV providers.

The change may seem like a hassle now but when everything is said and done everyone will benefit.