Originally Posted by

As television moved to the digital age, I was looking forward to this
technology making higher bandwidth digital components available more
cheaply that ham radio operators could use. The ATSC television system
carries a data rate of 19.39265846 mbps over a 6 MHz wide channel using
8VSB technology. This is something ham radio could use on UHF and SHF
frequencies to transmit some high speed digital data in less spectrum.
So I was looking forward to components like modulators that take a raw
bit stream (that in a TV application would carry the ATSC formatted data)
and output RF (to be upconverted to the frequency of interest), and
demodulators that to the reverse to reproduce that same bit stream.

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But there may still be time to act on this. I would like to suggest all
hams in the USA contact their Congress persons and urge them to make sure
that any law they impose that provides for copy protection for digital
and/or high definition television also have terms that ensure generic
purpose devices like demodulators with all of this technology will NOT be
required to comply with the interpretation of data bit streams. Perhaps
this could be made to work for devices that specifically do not cover all
TV channels, since amateur radio use would not have to involve that. But
we need to make sure we have some exception in the law to ensure the
rapidly dropping prices of this 8VSB digital technology can be usable for
hams setting up new 19.39265846 mbps digital data links. In the next few
years such a demodulator could be built from one or two chips at a cost
well under $100 due to the same chips (doing error correction codes,
trellis coding, and polynomial (de)scrambling, as well as RF conversion)
being mass produced for the digital TV and set top box market.