lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (12/15/84)
By the way, if someone out there thinks that they can start up a manufacturing line for cable demods and cabletext decoders that can be professionally produced for less than the approx. $500 end-user cost that is now being quoted by the manufacturer, the project (and the satellite carrier) would love to hear the details. The less expensive the equipment, the more likely the project is to succeed. However, these do have to be professionally made, not thrown together on open PC boards or something similar. To meet various standards, they would presumably have to be U.L. approved where appropriate, and meet cable industry criteria for filtering and interference rejection/production (or else cable companies will object to their being used with their systems). The manufacturing will require the development of custom chips for the cabletext data decoding/decryption, since off-the-shelf chips for most of the work are not available for the proprietary systems in use. The demods must be fully cable-ready, and direct-tunable to at least cable channel 54. Appropriate AFT circuits must be present to properly do the very delicate tuning for cabletext, which operates on a different criteria than tuning for a "good" TV picture. The manufacturing line should be capable of scaling up to thousands of decoders over a fairly short (though not immediate) time period. Hopefully the first units can be made available pretty quickly, otherwise the project will be forced to proceed with the existing units that are being manufactured now (by Zenith). If someone out there HONESTLY thinks they can do such manufacturing of the demod/decoder, and have professional and properly certifiable units that will cost the end users less than about $500, please let me know the details. I don't need to know how cheaply a homebrew decoder could be tossed together (though even that is not at all simple to do with discrete parts) but how cheaply you can start fullscale manufacturing for nationwide distribution. Right now, plain old cable TV converter boxes (RF to RF, not even video demod) cost between approx. $80-100 wholesale in most areas. I personally thought that $130 for a full demod was a damn good deal. And as for the decoder cost -- it looked pretty good cosidering what people are paying now and the limited (compared with mass market items) demand. But if someone out there has a way to manufacture all this stuff for less (perhaps through use of slave labor or gangs of graduate students? Oops, same thing...) please let me know. Seriously, the less expensive the equipment without sacrificing necessary quality, the better off we all are. I thought we were doing pretty good compared with costs up to now. If you can really do better, we're ready to listen. --Lauren--
cem@intelca.UUCP (Chuck McManis) (12/18/84)
Can we at least have the Encryption/Encoding scheme. I am in the unenviable
position of agreeing with both Lauren and Dave. True, a mass produced, UL
approved, FCC licesensed(sp?), Grade A whiz bang decoder box will probably
be >.5K. However, this system is sitting within spitting distance of a lab
capable of producing one (1) whiz bang decoder using state of the art
silicon devices, such as programable filter/convolver chips, highly
advanced microprocessors, programmable logic arrays, you name it. And we
could probably convince our managers to lets us build one if a.) It cut
down our phone costs, b.) It made a good Ap note for some of the chips.
It may not be suitable for manufacture on a large scale but it would serve
our needs.
So while I agree with Lauren on the difficulty of making a news decoder
I also agree with Dave in that I would rather try to build one, rather
than purchase it. This however brings up the possibility that given the
right information, lots of people may build them. I for one would like
to know up front, if you are going to consider the reception of news from
a homemade decoder to be allowable, or will require a "reception" fee
above the built in cost of paying for cable service every month.
--Chuck
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{ihnp4,fortune}!dual\ All opinions expressed herein are my
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