drmpeg

I'll never forget Dennis Erectus on KOME 98.5 (the wet spot on your dial) in 80's Silicon Valley.

For sure. Just YouTube alone is a vast ocean of H.264 bits.

MPEG-2 video is still very much alive. In the US, almost all terrestrial OTA broadcast (ATSC 1.0) and all SD channels on cable systems. Even Comcast VOD was all MPEG-2 (including HD) until they shut down the QAM version in 2023.

I was the project engineer for the Air Force Space Command / NORAD DSP satellite ground network back in the 80's. The system used the 10MB 8" Bernoulli drive and cartridges to store the early warning message traffic. The system was installed in 1988 and was decommissioned around 2005.

I'm not sure if they used the 8" cartridges all the way to 2005, but I can find out. I'm still friends with the original system maintainer. I pivoted to video compression in 1993 and lost track of the program, but we found each other on Facebook in 2010.

Advanced Television Systems Committee. It's the US standards organization for terrestrial digital television. ATSC 3.0 is a new standard that's very similar to DVB-T2 (used in the UK for HDTV) at the PHY layer.

Little known Fabrice Bellard project. He worked with the ATSC to test the ATSC 3.0 PHY layer when he was consulting at DekTec.

The article kind of disses the Intel 8085. For those of us with 8080 code bases that were never going to be rewritten for the Z80, it was a welcome upgrade. On the paper dryer process control systems I was working on in 1979, the 8085 based Intel 80/30 Multibus SBC could be dropped in for the older 8080 based 80/20 SBC with no changes and provide a significant 2.5X performance upgrade.

Looks like the esp4 and esp6 fixes have been pushed for 7.0, 6.18, 6.12 and 6.6 kernels.

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2026050851-iron-hurdle-6421@gre...

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2026050843-unplowed-spinster-cf...

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2026050832-remold-faceless-bed0...

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2026050825-heaving-spender-13a8...

Previous post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45790672

It's actively being maintained by Takashi Sakamoto. Here's the commit for Linux 7.0-rc1.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/0d6dd4738dbcc32b60c...

Meyer lemons from my backyard.

https://www.w6rz.net/lemons.png

Here's an emulation of WWV I did with a transmit capable SDR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LsJn0CyyZI

VSB came later. From https://www.tvtechnology.com/opinions/hdtv-from-1925-to-1994

In the United States in 1935, the Radio Corporation of America demonstrated a 343-line television system. In 1936, two committees of the Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA), which is now known as the Consumer Electronics Association, proposed that U.S. television channels be standardized at a bandwidth of 6 MHz, and recommended a 441-line, interlaced, 30 frame-per-second television system. The RF modulation system proposed in this recommendation used double-sideband, amplitude-modulated transmission, limiting the video bandwidth it was capable of carrying to 2.5 MHz. In 1938, this RMA proposal was amended to employ vestigial-sideband (VSB) transmission instead of double sideband. In the vestigial-sideband approach, only the upper sidebands-those above the carrier frequency-plus a small segment or vestige of the lower sidebands, are transmitted. VSB raised the transmitted video bandwidth capability to 4.2 MHz. Subsequently, in 1941, the first National Television Systems Committee adopted the vestigial sideband system using a total line rate of 525 lines that is used in the United States today.

Although everyone is interested in visible aurora, the proton flux is also really impressive. It peaked at 37,000 pfu at 1910Z. The highest ever recorded was 43,500 pfu in March 1991.

VistaVision has made a comeback with "The Brutalist", "One Battle After Another" and "Bugonia".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistaVision

Here's some captures from my Comcast system here in Silicon Valley.

https://www.w6rz.net/528x480.ts

https://www.w6rz.net/528x480sp.ts

Videos with non-square pixels are pretty rare...

Before HD, almost all video was non-square pixels. DVD is 720x480. SD channels on cable TV systems are 528x480.

There's some thought that Ukraine could become a tech hub after the war due to their drone technology.

Here's my ATSC 3.0 transmitter in C++.

https://github.com/drmpeg/gr-atsc3

Here's the Emmy that C-Cube Microsystems won back in 1995 for the MPEG-2 (actually unconstrained MPEG-1) encoder chip set used in the roll-out of DirecTV.

https://www.w6rz.net/DCP_1235.JPG

The original DirecTV encoder was MPEG-1 at 704x480 using eight CL4000 chips. Then in 1995 when the MPEG-2 capable CL4010 was finished, the encoders were upgraded to MPEG-2 (frame only encoding). Then upgraded again to a 12 chip AFF (Adaptive Field/Frame) encoder when the firmware was completed.

https://www.w6rz.net/videorisc.png

I believe he's using a 6m antenna at the Allen Telescope Array (ATA).

The first 16:9 content I ever saw was the trailer to "Batman Forever" (with Val Kilmer) in 1995 when I was working at C-Cube Microsystems. The studios use to send them test content all the time for video compression testing. It was on D1 tape, and looked beautiful for SD resolution. The professional Sony CRT 4:3 monitors back then had a 16:9 button to letterbox the image.

Yes, you have it correct.

However, predicting the effects of solar flares is very difficult. Not only does the particle stream have to hit the Earth, it has to couple with the magnetic field.

Large flares can cause small events on Earth and vice versa.

The CME from the X5.1 flare has not arrived yet. Here are the websites I use:

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/space-weather-enthusia...

https://www.spaceweather.com/

https://space.umd.edu/pm/

A severe geomagnetic storm is starting now (November 12 0000Z). But it's from the previous X-flares (X1.7 and X1.2), not the X5.1 flare.

A lightly coded (13/15 LDPC) 256QAM OFDM signal at 40 MHz wide could do 250 Mbps.

Or 31.25 million bytes per second if you prefer.

This would be for a point to point terrestrial link. OFDM probably wouldn't work for EME (at any power level).

Will you have arrays with the opposite antenna polarity for point to point links? That is, LHCP (Tx), RHCP (Rx) instead of RHCP (Tx), LHCP (Rx).

It's theoretically possible.

63.1 dbW = 93.1 dBm (240 watts + 39.3 dB gain)

path loss at 5760 MHz = 283.2 dB (at perigee)

RX gain = 39.3 dB

93.1 - 283.2 + 39.3 = -150.8 dBm

Noise floor at 1.2 dB noise figure and 500 Hz bandwidth = -151.9 dBm

SNR = +1.1 dB (easily detectable by ear with CW).

When I worked at LSI Logic in the 2000's, there were a lot of young Europeans (mostly Italian) on the staff. They had rented a house in Palo Alto which was affectionately called "The Pleasure Lounge".

It was just one of those houses that had the awesome party vibe. The only rule was that if you had to puke, you had to go in the back yard and do it in front of the Mother of Mary statue.

The best part was if you made it to 4 am, the Italians would break out the spaghetti, cook a big pot of it and serve it with just olive oil (no tomato sauce). Sitting around the kitchen table wicked hammered eating plain spaghetti is the correct way to end a party.

I got to go inside Cheyenne Mountain Complex back in 1988 when I was the project engineer for the DSP satellite ground network upgrade. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see any control room. In fact, I didn't get to see much at all. When we got there we were informed that the problem had already been resolved, so we just turned around and left.

But I did get to go down the tunnel and through the blast door.