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 April 1, 2005 Notes from a Road Trip I recently traveled by car to the easternmost part of Canada. There was no professional purpose to the trip, but my A/V sensors were working. Here are some observations from the journey. Any doubts about the popularity of satellite dishes would be quickly dispelled by a drive through rural New Brunswick. Our itinerary took us around the whole perimeter of the province, bypassing the cities, and I became increasingly aware of just how many houses were equipped with dishes. They were far more in evidence than in equivalent areas in Southern Ontario -- especially the larger, analog types. The larger dishes are used for pulling in signals from the older, low-power C-band, although I saw few of the big 10’ jobs that are familiar elsewhere. These dishes were mostly about 3’ or slightly more in diameter, so one wonders how good their noise performance could be. The larger the dish, the more of the signal is collected and fed to the actual working portion of the antenna. Small dishes mean a low signal level relative to noise level (snow, in picture terms). But the real explosion is in the small digital dishes; many houses with the older, larger dishes have digital units as well. Not a few houses had more than one of the small dishes, presumably to receive both the Canadian and American gray-market services. I saw at least one place with three dishes on the roof, one big and two small. I don’t know whether or not this popularity of satellite TV is a general maritime phenomenon; we didn’t visit Nova Scotia, and I began to notice the dishes only after we left Prince Edward Island and headed back across New Brunswick. But when we crossed into Quebec, travelling over the Gaspé Peninsula and driving along the south shore of the St. Lawrence, I was surprised to see numerous dishes there as well -- not as many as in New Brunswick, but lots nonetheless. I can only speculate as to why the dishes are so popular down east. A lot of over-the-air television is available in Southern Ontario; if I work at it, I can pick up more than 30 stations at home, just outside Toronto, and I gather there is even more choice in the Niagara region. But in places such as New Brunswick, towns big enough to have TV stations are farther apart, and the hills get in the way. Judging from the lack of regular antennas, I guess a lot of these viewers are receiving television for the first time, thanks to their dishes. Or maybe the people are just more technologically advanced than elsewhere. The trip also reminded me of one long-standing annoyance: the abysmal quality of television service in most hotels and motels. We stayed in half a dozen such establishments in four provinces and, with only a single exception, the pictures were dreadful. It doesn’t have to be that way. In early visits to Japan, I was impressed by how good the TV was in even modest hotels. The Japanese tend to be a bit obsessive about technical details, but it made for a pleasant viewing experience, even if I could rarely understand what was going on. At one time, I used to make a point of tweaking the controls of the TV set in any hotel room I stayed in. This often improved things considerably, although it couldn’t do much about the noisy incoming signal. Now many hotel rooms have stripped-down sets on which you can adjust nothing but channel and volume. If the picture is washed-out or too bright, or if it varies wildly from station to station, you have to live with it. The exception was a motor inn on Prince Edward Island. The sets still could not be adjusted, but they were good enough not to need it. They even had front-panel line inputs so you could hook up your camcorder and view holiday pictures taken earlier that day. And the TV pictures themselves came from digital satellite, so maybe Islanders love their dishes, too. It was one of the rare times I have enjoyed the television experience in an inexpensive lodging. If those folks can do it, so can everyone. ...Ian G. Masters
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