Network Six

Station Challenge 4 involves a technical test on the digital terrestrial network, namely the re-broadcaster network.

In this system, all the digital terrestrial transmitters accross the country eventually re-broadcast Network Six's Multiplex 3 from each other until every mast is relaying one mast. In this case, the mast in question will be Winter Hill, due to its proximity to Network Control.

During this test, the network transmitters gradually consolidate mux 3 into larger groups, before eventually the whole country is re-broadcasting one version of the Network (Northern) from Winter Hill. During this time, normal broadcasting on channel 6 will cease and be replaced by a test card suitable for MHEG / DTT, however normal network programmes will attempt to continue over on the SSN stream, using LCN 50 (this has been moved because its fairly unlikely viewers will receive this without re-scanning during the test, and also it will be the incorrect region). All other DTT channels on multiplex 3 will cease broadcasting.

Unfortunately, Winter Hill drops this feed at 4.21am and the whole network, which is relaying it, also fails too. It is your job to oversee the network returning to the regional system, and informing viewers of relevant information.

There are several steps to this process, which are outlined in greater detail in the attached Acrobat document. The document also contains the timeline of events, and suggested ideas you could use to complete this challenge.

Nice work on the documents, although I am still getting my head around a couple of things!

By the way Mark, I assume that the loss in quality of the digital signal will namely be of a highly compressed stream as static etc doesn't apply to digital?

I presume it will be mostly compression artefacts in this case.

I'm still trying to understand what it is we need to do!

ditto that one Nate! not to sure what to do! (had a long day, i think i will leave this til sunday!)

Oh, speaking of dates, when's the deadline, October isn't the best of months to do it!

The task is open to interpretation.
I'll complete Emoa's over the course of the week for example, but what I'm going to do is screen-caps informing viewers of the test, the stream disappearing, changing to a test-card (I'll upload the ones we need to use tomorrow), then the errors in transmission & return to regionalism at the end. But you could do absolutely anything, it is very open. The more original the better.

Deadline will be set following the announcement of the October schedule, likely to be 4 weeks.

That's good (regarding Testcards), I've put together a video but the testcards are of the wrong sort.

http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p105/...SC4/R1.png
http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p105/...SC4/R2.png
http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p105/...SC4/R3.png
http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p105/...SC4/R4.png
http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p105/...SC4/R5.png
http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p105/...SC4/R6.png
http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p105/...SC4/R7.png
http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p105/...SC4/R8.png

Thanking you - now time to get some sleep!

David Wrote:Thanking you - now time to get some sleep!

No problem.
Oh and as for your question I forgot to answer... effects on MPEG will not be static as you said... pixellation would be predominant.