CompuServe Messages

I find myself in the awkward position of defending the FCC though I have done my share of complaining about some of their decisions, but here goes. Due to the laws of physics and technological limitations, the useful radio frequency spectrum is limited. The primary job of the FCC is to fairly allocate those limited frequencies and insure that one transmitter does not infringe upon the operation of another. Television requires much more bandwidth than radio or current digital transmission and so one television channel uses as much spectrum 'real estate' as many radio stations would. For this reason, amoung others, television channels were alloted as little spectrum as possible. In order to increase the number of scan lines from 525 to 625, would either require more space being alotted for TV (thus bumping ALOT of radio channels) or some kind of new method for getting more info. in the same bandwidth. The FCC does its job primarily by saying, "your equipment will operate on these frequencies and within these tolerances.". How you do that is your business. I have never heard of the FCC writing a standard that was a defacto endorsement of one company's product. – Bob