On the dot at 10 AM this morning KRON’s ATSC 1.0 emission on RF 7 went down. Almost instantaneously the 3.0 lighthouse came online.
Congratulations to all involved on a successful 3.0 launch!
Unlike our reception of RF 6 KBKF, the RF 7 lighthouse is bright and strong here in Mountain View. We’re watching The Price is Right in 3.0 via Project Entangle (which admittedly doesn’t offhand appear any better than 1.0…and trick playing HEVC really taxes things!)
For the techies of you out there, the emission has a single PLP using 256qam modulation and a 10/15 code rate. It carries roughly 28 Mbps of baseband packet payload. About 25 Mbps are accounted for in service/LLS bitrates (service bitrates are tallied as the sum of the UDP packet lengths received for a service). All six services utilize ROUTE/DASH (no MMTP services). The services are (at least presently) not encrypted (no A3SA).
From a resolution standpoint, services that are 720p (KGO, KDTV, KTVU, KRON) on 1.0 are still 720p/60 on 3.0. KPIX and KNTV, which broadcast in 1080i on ATSC 1.0, appear to have gotten a bump to 1080p/60 (though its unclear if this is with a native 1080p/60 feed or if a 1080i feed is being upconverted).
SFBayATSC is currently monitoring RF 7 via an Airwavz RZR-1200 USB tuner/demod (we’re still having stability issues with the HDHomerun 3.0 devices).
For those of you looking for KRON’s subchannels (e.g. Charge!, Antenna, Rewind) they’ve been adopted by the other broadcasters participating in today’s launch. The previous post lists who’s carrying the programming previously on RF 7. In general a rescan of your TV/set-top box will find them at their new homes, though if you’re using a TiVo or other box that uses EPG then you’ll need to wait until your EPG provider catches up.