On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:24:07 +0000 (UTC), (Geoffrey
S. Mendelson) wrote:

Jeff Liebermann wrote:

Same here. Back in the 1970's, I lived in Israel for a while. In the
cities, everyone lived in big apartment complexes. Nobody watched the
official Israeli stations. The good programming was on the various
Arab stations, which were diverse, distant, and politically incorrect.
There was no cable TV (because the government didn't want to make it
easy to watch the Arab stations) so every apartment had its own
collection of antennas. Typical was a 3 meter pole with at least 4
yagis. Multiply that by at least 4 apartments per building and the
roof tops looked like an aluminum forest.

Those days are gone, we have cable TV, DBS TV and streaming video on the
Internet. In the cities the antennas remain, no one wants to pay the money
to remove them. Eventually it will be necessary to repair the roofs under them
and take them down.

Yes, I know. The real problem with the antenna clutter is that there
was some shading of the ubiquitous solar water heaters also on the
same rooftops. While trying to repair one of the antennas, I stepped
on the glass collector and cracked it. Oops.

Incidentally, I recall that most of the roofs were poured concrete
which could probably withstand a mortar attack. I doubt if they will
require much repair.

While in Israel, I had the bright idea of starting a company to
provide cable TV. I went to the Ministry of the Post (now called
Ministry of Communications), asked about the regulatory details, and
was immediately detained as some manner of spy or subversive.
Apparently, CATV was rather unpopular with the government at the time.
I had to be rescued by my relatives. Sometime in the 1980's, Israel
established the Council for CATV and Satellite Broadcasting, who's
primary purpose was to obstruct deployment. That changed after one of
the changes of government, which suspected that there would be less
rioting in the streets, if people stayed home and watched TV.
http://www.moc.gov.il

At the time, I had been in the US 2way radio biz, so I decided that
Israel might benefit from a commercial radio company. I went back to
the Ministry of the Post, inquired about licensing, and was again
detained as a spy or something. I was again rescued by the relatives.
At the time, during essentially a war time economy, there was no
commercial radio service. That also has changed, but at the time, the
only radio communications was government, military, and ham radio.

We are also supposed to have digital terrestrial TV in a few months, but instead
of each station having various programs, there will be multiple channels
on the same frequency.

We have the same thing here. At this time (before the demise of
analog in June), TV stations are broadcasting one 6 MHz channel of
analog. They were also granted a 2nd 6Mhz channel for digital, which
carries 1 to 4 digital channels. Usually it's a clone of the analog
channel, a Spanish language version, continuous news, and something
else. For a while, one station had one channel with a DTV camera
scanning the scenery around their transmitter building. It was one of
the few things worth watching, but alas, it went away.



--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558