Digital TV Audio Scanner?

[Shortwavewave]

I couldnt think of a better title, but my question is when the TV signals go to digital, is there a scanner that can pick those up?

I know ive used a BCT15 to pick up regualr Tv signals but would a "digital" scanner pick up the New TV channels?

 

[br0adband]

Since the signals will be purely digital and the audio is embedded in the digital signal, aka compressed, the simple answer is no. You won't be able to tune into specifically the audio portion like with analog TV because there's just one signal this time out, not separate audio and video signals.

 

[petrol88]

Last time I looked, the least expensive chip set for digital TV was $40 in bulk quantity. So, adding digital TV audio would likely cost $100 at retail. Any takers?

 

[gmclam]

They're building full converters now and selling for $40 so I think cheaper parts can be had. To receive ATSC audio, the receiver needs to lock onto the signal and demodulate the data packets. Parse the data packets extracting only the desired audio. Decode the data from MPEG back to audio. Eventually I imagine a specialized chip will be designed to do all of this, but it is certainly not something out there right now.

I might add that there still really aren't many ATSC receivers on the market although the analog cutoff date is less than 1 year & 12 days away. If it wasn't for the $40 government coupon program, I'm not convinced there'd be many converters out there either. Once everything is actually switched over, and companies have exhausted the market for separate converters/tuners perhaps this one will hit someone's RADAR.

 

[zz0468]

I'm guessing that the market demand for this is too small to bother with. With analog TV, the ability to do that is easy to do, and probably involves little more than a few lines of code in the cpu. Now, with it requiring a separate chipset, I don't see it happening.

 

[kb2vxa]

Why not give the short answer and be done with it? No and no, end of thread.

 

[key2_altfire]

I've been wanting to decode the ATSC audio layer in my shack for a while now, best way I can think of (and it's a clunker) is to use an ATSC converter box's audio outputs only. Just use it as an audio tuner.

...then might as well add the $40 for a TV right? Haha...