This is a good article, and his basic premise is worth thinking about: 'When we separate ourselves from the systems that work on our behalf by adding layers and layers of complexity, we are ultimately doomed to fail.'
I agree with this, but I don't see it as particularly applicable to digital TV. He talks about running translators for analog television to provide PBS access to his local community. He concludes that analog signals are easy to work with, and then contrasts this with digital: 'If you want to really examine the signal itself, you need an expensive device that is able to recognize the signal and help you debug what's going on. Of course, our small TV organization cannot afford the cost of such a device, so most of the time, we can only guess.'
This seems misguided, and like an attempt to fix the problem with the wrong tools. Sure, it's difficult to diagnose the problem with an oscilloscope, but with cheap digital tuner cards available it seems like it should be possible to do a similar analysis in software. If one was tasked with retransmitting a DTV signal, it seems like the solution would be to decode (with error correction if possible) rather than blindly retransmitting the signal as analog. Is this harder than it sounds?
No. I suspect that person simply has a lot of experience with analog and little to none with digital and all of TV is not switching to digital. I wouldn't want to be him.
I think simple solutions work great when you are not at scale. But to achieve greater scale or quality (or in the case of computing, reliability), you need to delve deeper and deeper into the nuances and make things more complex. It's kind of like when you know more about something, the bigger picture isn't as important anymore when you can focus deeply on the specific problem.
In this case, he's arguing that we are just trying to create a better mouse trap, whereas in reality we've hit that 80/20 rule and to get that last bit requires making some big changes, disproportional it seems to what it took to get the first 80.
I agree with this, but I don't see it as particularly applicable to digital TV. He talks about running translators for analog television to provide PBS access to his local community. He concludes that analog signals are easy to work with, and then contrasts this with digital: 'If you want to really examine the signal itself, you need an expensive device that is able to recognize the signal and help you debug what's going on. Of course, our small TV organization cannot afford the cost of such a device, so most of the time, we can only guess.'
This seems misguided, and like an attempt to fix the problem with the wrong tools. Sure, it's difficult to diagnose the problem with an oscilloscope, but with cheap digital tuner cards available it seems like it should be possible to do a similar analysis in software. If one was tasked with retransmitting a DTV signal, it seems like the solution would be to decode (with error correction if possible) rather than blindly retransmitting the signal as analog. Is this harder than it sounds?