NOTE --- This is the SIXTEEN page GARY BOURGOIS/PETER KNOWLES INTERVIEW on LTRN August 27, 1993. Transcribed by Philip C. Dolve as ALL ABOUT THE DIGICIPHER Volume II. GARY BOURGOIS: It's just after nine o'clock. We're going to start right away with our special guest, Peter Knowles, from Houston Tracker. I know you've got a lot of questions for him. It seems like a vast majority of you have Tracker equipment, especially those of you who are interested in KU Band -- one of the topics tonight. We also want to talk about the future of Digital Television. So, without further adieu, Hello Peter. PETER KNOWLES: How's it Gary! GARY BOURGOIS You are out there in Denver. What' s the weather out there like? Better than last week? PETER KNOWLES: I don't know. I haven't seen it for about four hours but it was grey and miserable and rather cold for now. My office is hidden in the bowels of the building so -- they know where to put me. GARY BOURGOIS They don't want you idly staring out that window. PETER KNOWLES: You've got it! GARY BOURGOIS What exactly is your position at Houston Tracker? You must have an official job title. PETER KNOWLES: Well, I am the engineering support individual. What that means is the mistakes that people see in our products with default channels that aren't right or programs that moved and we didn't catch them in time. That's in no way my fault. At least I carry the can for it. So I decide what is a favorite program on our product. I write what audio is there and so on, provide the software guys that go do the hard work. I act in a support role and read the Internet thing every day. That's one of my tasks. I look after customers who, maybe, slipped through the net, so to speak. If for instance, they had a problem at either dealer level or at a distribution point, or a service problem or technical problem with the product that really hadn't be handled by other people, it might well end up on my desk or on my phone line. We will try to do our best and put it right. So that's fundamentally . . . I do advise our engineering department technically on programming issues, and some technical issues -- things that we want to add into the product. I've been in the business for about ten years in one way or the other. I started with Echosphere; I went to Europe and opened up Echosphere for Europe from a technical standpoint. I spent a lot of time in the European scene. I recently came back into this job. It's been a lot of fun. We deal with lots of people who are pretty interesting. A lot of people are very enthusiastic who get through to me... It's kind of fun! GARY BOURGOIS So you basically make a living doing what the rest of us do as a hobby. PETER KNOWLES: Yah! I have a multi standard TV in my office. I have a ten foot Prodlin(?) on an Ajax mount setting outside of the building. I go cruising. I do a lot of scanning. I do it at home as well which is a problem for my wife, but... GARY BOURGOIS Now that's odd because most people when they get away from work they like to get away from work! It seems that Satellite gets in a person's blood. PETER KNOWLES: Absolutely. I live about forty miles from the office. That's the reason we couldn't get thru last week -- A major storm and we lost the power in the telephone. I'm lucky. I have about twenty acres out on the Eastern plains. At the moment my count of dishes is eight (laugh) of different types. I just poured concrete this week for a fourteen foot Compact can and a sixteen foot Paraclips. GARY BOURGOIS What are you going to get with those? PETER KNOWLES: Well, because I'm English, (that's not too difficult to kind of discover I guess listening) but I do like to watch BBC World Service TV for the remaining time it's going to remain in the clear. We can come back to that in a bit, but I like to watch that. I can see as far East as The Intelsat at 27.5 (degrees). If it's out there I want to see it. I think there is lots of people like me. I'm just real lucky that I landed in a place. It's a little town called Kiowa, Colorado. I'm about a mile outside of town. There is no planning commission. I don't have any weeny telling me which way I do things. In fact the town is kind of interested. They think I'm kind of crazy. And maybe they are right! GARY BOURGOIS Very well. Could be! You are probably in good company here with the rest of the listeners to this program. We're all blonkers about this thing called Satellite. We have a lot of fun with it. We're always looking for the new things. In a bit we want to talk about Digital TV. But, when you and I were talking off the air, we got to talking about some new products coming from HTS. What can you tell me about this new Elite model? PETER KNOWLES: O.K. We have a new product. It's called the Tracker Elite with the HTS label. Very cleverly it calls itself the Echo Star 400 if it's sold out of an Echosphere office. It's a fairly straight-forward receiver. It's a front loading VCR S box. You pull down the front panel, put it in. There is another sub panel that if the smart card, as Jim said the other week, becomes a reality you won't have to fumble around the back to get to the Smart Card to change it or whatsoever you have to do with it. It is very, very simple to program, very accurate programming. The real interest is that it will take all the birds in the arc. You can locate about ninety satellites. You can change the configuration or defaults on seven of them. But the interesting thing is what we have done with KU. I find KU, personally, real frustrating as I think we all do. What we have done is put in a form of KU Video Seek or Scan. I don't know what to call it. I think we call it both in the manual. What this does if you go in and locate A KU bird, say G 4 is a real good example of something tough. It will start scanning in the Horizontal polarity at the bottom of the band and go along until it discovers real video. Now if it discovers B MAC for example, it slides by because it does have a quality video detect switch inside it and it says, "This is not good video. You can't see it in any case. Why bother?" So it continues scanning on. It will stoop for things like Leach, VC-1B, etc because they have real sync. Now once it has found an NTS signal or whatever, it will stop and you can either store it or stay on that fequency. For instance, if it's a ball game or a news feed that's going to be itinerant in nature, you can sit there and watch it. Or if you don't want to watch it just push the enter key again. The thing will continue to scan up to the top of the band. Then it will come back and switch polarities, and come back down to the bottom and stop. If you want to Store. You can store two frequencies per KU bird. Of course if you do store them, the next time you go in there you can recall them very easily, but remembering the chances are that the puppies have moved and the frequency you have stored is now blank. It is very easy just to scan it again. I have an Elite attached to one of my dishes just for that KU scan. It's just great because the frustration I know that some of the listeners are going to feel and see. You go, especially on the G7 and the G4, on the KU sides. You go to the channel with almost any product. Not just ours, but anybodies. You see the channel momentarily as the Polorotor spins around to the appropriate polarity which of course is not where the picture is. And then, for the average user which is maybe not represented in the listeners here, but for the average guy, he doesn't know what happened. He says, "Gees, you know this picture was there and then it disappeared." We are looking very hard to try and see if we can implement this feature into a lot of current of Tracker products. And that means also Echo products. The problem is it's a memory hog in terms of the amount of space it uses in the prom. So we've got to look and see what we can dump out. There is software in the Proms that is test software that the end user never sees unless he is he is real smart or which we use in manufacturing in the factories and so on. I'm pushing at the moment that we shove that out the door and let them find their way without it so we can put this KU Seek in. I think it's just great. The video on the on the 400 is really super good. The audio, and this is a drawback. A decision was made by the marketing people on Price was that we did not support Narrow band Audio. I think it was maybe a mistake, a hindsight, being twenty. I think if we produce ultimately in a couple years time if they produce an Elite Plus or a 400 Plus then it will have Narrow Band Audio. That's maybe the only thing that we really made an error on. The feedback we got from the market was not the best. Nevertheless, it's a good product. GARY BOURGOIS For people who have the existing Trackers, the 8's, the 9's, the 10's, the +'s. What about G4 and G7? PETER KNOWLES: O.K. It's really wrong. Even the latest revisions in the software of the 10+, etc was wrong. The information that was given, and this was while I was still back in Europe, and the information given to our software people wasn't correct. Even some of the information given by Hughes to even some of the other manufactures I've talked to was not correct. The thing is wrong and the formats just don't follow correctly. G4 and G7 as lots of people now know, the polarity is actually reversed between the two birds, but some of the channels aren't the same. They've done very strange things. They have three video transponders in one channel. I think there is two channels like that on G4. G7 doesn't have quite the same configuration. In a nutshell, none of our products support either G4 or G7 properly apart from the Elite which supports it in a different manner. The only way that I know is to go to an ANIK C format. Then be prepared to go and diddle the polarity which is what I think most people have done forever. GARY BOURGOIS Yah. We're pretty used to that I guess. PETER KNOWLES: I think so. GARY BOURGOIS O.K. now: Digital Television. You know, that was the topic here two weeks ago when we talked with Jim Shelton of General Instruments. He had the GI view of Digital TV. What is Houston Trackers thinking and your thinking along these lines? PETER KNOWLES: Let's get this one. Lots of people know that there is a number of versions of Digicypher. There is Digicipher I and Digicipher II which is a transitional thing and won't be available until next year. Digicipher II is going to be N Peg compatable. The latest hook that has been thrown in is the Dolby Audio standard which is called AC3. This is very confusing because of the compatability issue, say with the ATT. Digital Television looks to be a little bit more tough than it was. There are hooks and there are programs within N-Peg II which would make it allegidly transparrent if you had a digital decoder that was N-Peg II, Digicipher II. Some people are telling us that it should be able to see and understand the essay of the ATT system. The problem is conditional access could very well be different therefore it wouldn't do you a whole lot of good. We can receive it butwe can't decode it because the digital access is different. So there's lots of things happening. In fact in about a weeks time, one of my bosses is departing to Brussels for another N-Peg II meeting. They are going to try and hammer out some of these points because if they don't we could end up the same situation as the Europeans who curantly have something like eleven different decoders for satellite television -- all incompatable with each other. So, let's get to where our thinking is as a company. We are concerned that people who have a vast investment in Tracker and Echosphere products wouldn't want to be told, "Hey by the way guys, this is no longer any good. You can either trade it in or throw it away or give it to the kids to play with." We think that's maybe the wrong approach. The approach that we would like to take is going to be dependent on the programmers. I'll come into that in a second. Basicly what we're looking at is a -- I don't want to call it "Converter" -- because it realy is a receiver. I want to look at a receiver which would be a digital-ready receiver: Digicipher II. It would not have a VCRS board or VCRS componants on the board. It would have a different tuner to the tuner say is in the parent Tracker 10. If you want to draw this out, you take the I-F feed coming in from your dish, take it into this receiver, the digital receiver, which would have a I-F loop which would then feed your main unit which would position the polarity and position the dish etc. If the unit detected a digital signal, it would deliver the digital signal to you. The output of your existing IRD would come back into this digital receiver so it could then go to your television efficiently. If it didn't see a digital signal, it would simply feed the output of your IRD or the audio on video back up -- feed this through the modulator or through the AV output in the usual way. The aim would be so that it should be transparrent. Now, let's talk about the programmers. The programmers are the ones that are going to say, "Yah, we're going to offer direct to home or TVRO. We are going to offer them a subscription service with our digital program. If they do, this box is then viable for a company like ours to make. We feel there is a magic price. The magic price for this add on goodie box has got to match that of Direct TV. We feel this is just a marketing deal. We think we can do it for between seven and eight hundred dollars. This is a guesstamit. We don't even know how much GI is going to say, "Hey, this is how much they want for their Chip set". So there is a lot of unknowns. Of course, the biggest unknown, is not the technology but whether the programmers are going to play ball. Say there was a channel called FILM PLUS. If Film Plus was on Drake TV or on USSB or Charley Urgins Echostar Satellite when it goes up, they may not want to provide us as TVRO C- Band guys with access to their digital signals. They say, "Hey no. If you want to see our film channel, go and buy a subscription to Drake TV. We think that is a negative, that would be terrible because there is a big market. There is aledgebly four million dishes in this country now if we take in Canada etc. I would be optomistic and say, "Hey, let's hope that the programmers will play ball." If they do, we have no reason to pre suppose that we're not going to have a nice box. It's not going to be cheap. I don't consider Seven Hundred Dollars cheap. But it should be efficient and it does mean that your VCRS, your IRD that you have today doesn't become just so much junk. The problem with just a Digital Only receiver is the fact that before this world becomes a "Digitle Only" world it's going to take many, many years. Some programs I'm sure are never going to make it.' I hope that kind of explains -- At the moment this is a kind of wish within the engineering department of HTS and Echo. Just to explain to people that HTS engineering does the designs for Echosphere products so that's where the two come in. We do all the hard work. They go and do the selling. Those are wishes that we have as a company. Those wishes are going to be realy dependent on -- the fruition of them is going to be dependent on GI with whom we have a pretty good relationship. We've spoken to their people. They've been very straight about what they're doing. I think there are parts of it that they don't know. I think Jim (Shelton) was pretty blunt in his chat and said there are things we really don't know. We have the programmers who are a different sort of guys. It's whether they see the advantage of selling to another potentially four million customers. I hope that's clear. GARY BOURGOIS O.K. So this device is not really a stand alone descrambler. PETER KNOWLES: It would be a stand alone in digital. GARY BOURGOIS But it's actually also a receiver. Right? PETER KNOWLES: It is a receiver. But if you want to move the dish and you want to change polarity, that belongs to the host receiver. If there was a cause -- and we don't think there will be. If there a need for somebody who only wanted digital programming, would you put a positioner, would you put a polerotor in there. Of course we could do that and it would cost X more. We don't want to be redundant, Gary. Charley Urgan, the guy that owns this company, Echostar and Houston Tracker, is pretty well known around the industry. Charley has a guideline for all the engineers here that you don't go and load the product with something that only a minority of the people will ever want to use. If we put the price up ten dollars at manufacture, by the time it gets out to the consumer, the end user, it's not ten dollars, it's a lot more. That's the wrong way. We are looking at ways of putting both on goodies -- adding things -- We are looking seriously at Digital. We are looking at SCPC and see where it comes in. I would personally love to see us do a DAT and C-DAT. The only problem there, I understand, is that they do have the ability to encode if somebody does come and build a reasonable product for that. I mean (an aside) that's just my wish list, not necessarily HTS's. We do have a policy which is really tough and strongly done: Don't load the product with a lot of junk that the majority of people don't need or won't use. If it doesn't cost us any money, we put it in. For instance, we buy an E-Prom. It may cost us some hours in programming time to add a feature. But if it doesn't cost us money, it's a great thing! We'll put it in because it's more marketable. That's really the key in the thing. The unit that we're proposing would be a stand alone box but, its aim and its point in life is really to fill a need and work with an IRD. We're not saying, it has to work just with our IRD. We're looking at is the software to drive the Digital Box with the same hand control that the guy has got today. We're not saying -Go out and buy yourself a hand control. Now the only thing, and again this is an unknown. You may have to go out and buy --I get two different stories from different people -- and that is the LNB. The phase, noise, and stability of a lot of C-Band LNBs isn't necessarily good enough, we believe for digital video -- for the N-Peg standard. We think that it's going to have to be, maybe -- we don't know -- but maybe somebody is going to have to come up and say, "This is a better class of LNB." For SCPC I have an LNB made by MTI in Taiwan which has very low phase noise. It is utterly stable. It has never drifted in six months. It has been set on one SCPC channel for that oeriod of time. Those are some of the unknowns. We don't have a crystle ball. We're not mushrooms growing in the dark. There are too many ifs and buts for us to go and comit to production at this point. And of course the N-Peg thing hasn't been put to bed. I don't believe it will be until this time next year. GARY BOURGOIS Well, that's it. We are a year yet away from anything that GI is going to do and there could be some changes. They basicly have already changed the game plan on us. At one time it was going to be what they called Digicypher I. GARY BOURGOIS: Let's take our first call and see what we have for you. Go ahead, you're on Friday Night Live with Peter Knowles. CALLER: Hello Peter. PETER KNOWLES: Hi. Good evening. CALLER: How you doing? PETER KNOWLES: I'm fine thank you. CALLER: Professor Anonymous here. PETER KNOWLES: O.K. CALLER: I'd like you to give a message to Charley Urgan -- PETER KNOWLES: O.K. CALLER: Thank you from all of us in the C-Band Home Satellite Market for what you did to Titon. Good Bye. We'll remember you. GARY BOURGOIS: (laugh) There's a story there. You don't have to comment on it if you don't want to. PETER KNOWLES: I think for the people who don't understand, Charley put some money into a corporation called TITON that had an alternative technology box that did look rather like a VC2 Plus. It was strictly cool and everything else. They had done all the work. Paul Motoff, my old boss at one point, who had done all the work, the ex President of HTS, he was the CEO of Titon and of course Showtime and HBO and some of the other guys out there, the programmers said, "Hey, we want a second source. We'd love to have somebody else doing this so we are not tucked in with GI. As many people know, and some may not know, when push came to shove, Titon was ready to roll. I have a big file sitting here at my desk looking at me which says `Titon' all over it. Basically what happened, the programmers said, "No we don't want to go play." Now if HBO and Showtime didn't want to go play on the Titon data stream, there was basically no point because nobody else would sign up. So, it ended that Titon shut up shop on this product. They produce military products and other stuff, but this whole deal -- In fact there is some kind of rumblings going on because Titon and Charley aren't agreeing on all the points that happened to the company so -- the company council, the lawyers are certainly making some money. I find it very sad. It's just a great shame that people change their mind. I'd have loved to see an alternative. GI's part in this was, "Well we don't want to mix your data stream with our data stream," which was fundamental to the success of the project. It died on the vine. The idea that Charley had with Titon was pure and simple. One, he could produce the box cheaper than the competition, so he felt. Whether that's true or false I don't know. I couldn't tell you. The other thing was, he wanted to see if we could get the programmers to do it cheaper because the operating overhead would be less. He really did it for this business. He did it for the people who are his bread and butter. GARY BOURGOIS: You're listening to Friday Night Live, Spacenet 3, Channel 21. Peter, talking about the ultimate receiver. This is something that I have thought would be viable. I'm not sure. I have sat down and blocked designed a short wave receiver along these lines. The same idea that they have with computers. i.e. Plug in modules to add features. Have you ever looked at anything like that. PETER KNOWLES: Yes we have. In fact we have some new engineers in the company. They're not new engineers, only to us. They have come direct to us from the computer industry. One of them is the new director of engineering, a guy called Mark Jackson. Mark has come to us from a similar position in Tandum Computers. He's a real Whiz. He loves the idea of the mother board and plug in cards. Commercially it will make sense in my opinion because, again this follows Charley Urgans point that you don't add in what people don't want. GARY BOURGOIS: You have the basic "Granny Model." If somebody wants the additional audio features, they just plug that in. If they want... PETER KNOWLES: Some things that we are seriously looking at. Some of the listeners may know, Echostar, which is a part of the group is planning to put up a DBS satellite at I think it's about 119 degrees in something like 1995. We plan to have a whole range of receivers for that. We want to use the same basic platform. What we are thinking is, -- The plug in module -- The Computer industry was no dummy. Let's face it. They have made lots of improvements, provided lots of facilities with plug-in slots. It's some thing we are revisiting again. We looked at it a couple of years ago. The cost of doing it in the way that we manufactured then made it a little bit uneconomic. We now have our own factory in Malaysia in a place called Sinai. So we have a lot more control over our destiny. We are not just providing a design and going and monitoring somebody. We have HTS people in Sinai permanently. We think we are going to become better manufacturers and we have a lot more freedom. These things are positive. That is one thing we've really looked at very seriously. GARY BOURGOIS: Well I'm glad to hear that. The problem that I have with my Drake is that I keep filling up the memory. Having a building full of computers, when you run out of memory, you add more memory. It would be nice to have a satellite receiver that did the same thing. Commercial Break GARY BOURGOIS: Let's take another call here. I let the phone ring so the caller wouldn't have to pay during the commercial. Hello you're on the air with Peter Knoles from Houston Tracker. CALLER: Hi Gary. Hello Peter. This is Frank in Los Angeles. The question I have is pretty simple. There is a network that advertises various satellite equipment. There's two or three of them on the satellite right now. The one in particular that rates satellite equipment based upon their viewpoint. The question I have to you is that this company, this organization that sells products, has been found out to be false advertising one of their own developments as far as a LNB. I'd like to know what Houston Tracker's viewpoint is by allowing these people -- is it a contract they have? -- some kind of thing to sell your products. What kind of a policy does Houston Tracker have with the dealers who may be caught doing fraudulent advertising or maybe doing things that might cause problems for the consumer who purchase certain things from them. PETER KNOWLES: O.K. I may be the worst guy in the company to talk about that because I am not on the commercial side. I know exactly who you are talking about. My understanding is that we do not deal with that particular company directly. In other words there is no law in the country that says he can't go to one of our distributors and buy the product which is what I understand but not necessarily what I know. We believe that the individuals concerned go and buy the products from one of our distributors who gets bonuses for selling more and more products. He kind of gets a better deal out of it; the distributor makes money out of it. Legalistically apparently under the laws of the land we can't really say -- we can't discriminate -- because we get in all sorts of lawsuits, etc. If the guy is committing fraudulent acts or cases where it is false or misleading advertising, and so on. My understanding is that the American Government has a whole section of bills about that. And with the consumer people that's up to them. We can't really stop somebody. We have had a situation, not here but, in Europe and Asia where we had people cloning our receivers. Apparently there was nothing we could do. I know Asia is not the United States. I think the best thing -- I just feel sorry for the people who do get caught in these traps -- the best thing is the publicity they get on Internet, the publicity he gets by just your comments. Informed people aren't going to get caught. I don't know the answer. Houston Tracker's policy as far as a distributor or dealer not doing it right: They will do their damndest to cut him off. What happens is that this is a global village. Satellite dealers and distributors, it's a pretty tiny group. If somebody wants to supply him it's pretty tough. We can actually track stuff through the serial number. If you come up with a serial number, say Number 1234, we can tell you which distributor took it. Then of course you find it went from distributor A and it went over to dealer B. B sold it to dealer C. Of course by that time, you've lost it. CALLER: Yah the reason I asked it is. I know that some of the Amateur Radio Manufactures require a licensing fee to carry equipment in various Amateur Radio outlet stores who carry Ham gear. You have to put a certain amount of money down. But they also are under the same net if something goes wrong with the equipment or the FCC -- similarly we had a radio that was not OKAYED by the FCC. The company itself, that manufactured it, took on all legal obligations. The reason I'm asking: No one can blame Houston Tracker for the misleading representation of a piece of a gear which is not a Houston Tracker system. My idea is that this being one of the products advertised along with this piece of equipment. PETER KNOWLES: I understand. It's a tough one. We've got two legal characters here. Our legal council guys are pretty shrewd etc. We've taken this stuff. He watches TV. He has a dish in his back yard. I know that he is awfully concerned about it. There's only so much that we can do as a company. We do make it tough. If somebody is goofing off, or we start hearing a lot of complaints. If a dealer says this distributor is not playing it fair or whatever. They get as tough as they can commercially within the law and try and get the people retrained. In my seven years with the company I've only seen maybe two cases where things got a bit rough. I just wish that some of the magazines that the consumer that watches the program might be well able to read. I'm talking about the program magazines. It's a great pity that some of the messages about some of these wonderful offers -- I think I heard one on one of those channels where a consumer had been advised -- we're not talking about people like who may be listening to this show -- I'm talking about a consumer who was advised, "There's no problem in putting in a ten foot dish and if you live on the East coast you can sure watch European programming." I actually heard that. Now you can watch some. We know that. You can watch news feeds, etc. But you're not going to watch a film net or Astra or Channel Inn or something. It's just not going to happen. The inference from the statement made by this individual was "Oh, sure you can watch that." In fact I come from somewhere near there. It's horrific. I don't know how you do it. Our trade press does a good job. But Joe Consumer doesn't see that. He only sees the magazines with all the goodies in it. CALLER: I understand that. My only concern say if you were to have a Houston Tracker 10 and buy one of these so called LNB's. Basically they claim that it is supposed to make the picture so much better. If a person buys one of these he can get a false sense, not technically or into the information about this certain LNB. They might fall to say, "It must be my receiver that is mal functioning, not the LNB which is rated so low. It is supposed to work better than anything on the market. It can cause a misconception to the consumer who may not technically inclined or privy to watch say a Gary show. PETER KNOWLES: You are so right and a lot of people don't understand. Especially in this KU market. I have yet to see a point five db KU LNB. I just gave an LNB to one of our girls here. They are installing a dish tomorrow up in the mountains. She was worried. She said this is a 1.4 db. I said, "You won't know the difference. If you think about this in db terms, between a 1.4 and a .7. The difference you are going to see on the screen, if everything is perfect, if the dish is wonderful, your focal length is just right and it's in the center of the dish. If you see more than about 3 or 4 tenth of a db difference in the picture, then you're doing darn good. Most of us can't see that. Most of us certainly can't measure it. So I think there is a lot of people out there -- this no-noise LNB business is a salesmans dream. I don't want to take too long on this but I can remember a few years ago I got one of the first 35 degree C-Band LNBs that came in this company to go test. I played with a Tempo Prodlin all on Saturday. I made sure that everything was super. I called my wife who is a very honest lady from Gary's land in Michigan. I played with this and I said, "Hey look at this picture. It's great!" She said, "I can't see the difference." And this is at the end of me slaving in the hot sun for twelve hours! Of course she was telling the truth. This was like the Hans Christian Anderson "The King's New Clothes" thing. But I convinced myself it was better! Maybe it was, fractionally. We're talking between a 55 and a 35. It's 2 tenths of a db. You can't see it. If on the other hand you are trying to look at Intelsat which is giving you a week and watery picture. If you can chip off a few degrees, sure. It might make a bit of difference. If you're looking at G1, forget it. People forget this. This KU business. I think it's been good for LNB manufactures. I think there are a lot of people like my wife who told the truth, "There's no difference. Not that I can see." GARY BOURGOIS: Hello, you're on the air with Peter Knowles. CALLER: This is Wayne from West Texas. Having come from the Audio engineered side of the think, I have yet to hear any satellite receiver that I think has the best audio or audio equipment of what audio is because they are still rating in per cent of distortion instead of hundredths of per cent of distortion. Speaking of wide band filters, the Chaparral series has the 600 wide band so they do the Anik so.so The question I want to ask is do you know much about the way the digicipher stuff is. I mean, are they using -- splitting it into four six megahertz band widths and just using twenty- four megahertz and then splitting that into four? Then doing their compression on each one of those? Do you know? PETER KNOWLES: I'm not the right guy to answer that one properly. My understanding was that it is inter leaved and that was no actual division as such. It was simply an interleave signal so they were going to use the entire transponder. Interleave each channel as we would know it digitally it would be seamless. I can find out. We do have our Digital Engineer. We have a digital video group that is working. It consists of about three engineers with one of pretty top guys is being made a director of Digital Engineering. I can ask them and if you want to give me a shout later on next week. I'll see him on Monday. I can ask him exactly. The problem is, if I ask him anything he just gets into higher math and kind of loses this old guy. CALLER: I understand. I have a tendency to be talking along and explaining something to a customer, and think I'm speaking in normal terms when, in reality, I'm speaking in engineering terms. I mention capacitors or resistors. They start making funny looks on their face like, "What are these things?" PETER KNOWLES: I know what you're saying. But if you're really interested I can put you in touch with this guy and he could give his best shot at trying to explain to you the real formation of the signal. My understanding was it's an interleaved signal. I truly am on real thin ice. CALLER: I've always theorized and Gary can probably vouch for this, there is no reason that you can't take that signal, strip the digital off and then present it to us in some way that our present receivers can address that. Probably even have some kind, of tie-in to the receiver in which the audio sub carriers which won't be there on the digital can switch the actual channel that are on the digital channel. PETER KNOWLES: My understanding is that the existing range of Trinity modulators just can't make the transfer. You've got to take off fat. You've got to bleed off the I-F and take through a whole different path of demod. The thing is, when you've done that, if you look at the real cost of Trinity Mods around today, by the time you've messed around with them you've maybe spent a lot of money needlessly to make those hooks and changes it would be much better to put in a dedicated tuner that offered the correct noise figures etc. and the stability phase noise and so on that the digital signal is going to demand. That's the story that they've given me for our RF group and I tend to believe them. CALLER: Speaking of phase noise, is anyone saying, "I know what much of the digital signal up there is having to be dealt with now on KU and stuff like that for business stuff. It is essential to go with phase lock loops because you drift two kilohertz. The digital signal just got shifted in your history. PETER KNOWLES: As we said earlier this evening, we've got two stories on this one. One is that, No you don't need any difference. The second one is, Yes you do. We're sitting right on the fence. We have one of our senior RF engineers who has a lot of experience in commercial microwave for the last thirty years. He is saying, "It needs to be a PL LNB." That's his statement. At the moment there is now way of proving him right or wrong because we don't have access at this point to for instance, the Digicipher decoder. In fact Digicipher is saying, "You can run with a regular LNB." I don't know what the pay off is. There are all ready KU and C-Band PL LNBs available. My first one cost me $1700. bucks. I remember. I still have the bill. Charley Urgan got rich on that one. But, whatever. CALLER: Ya, I know. PETER KNOWLES: It's a debate point and I don't want to labor it. Truly, I don't know and I don't think too many people do - yet. CALLER: Well, the Digital information right now is at best computer information that if it drifts it is a problem. But we're not talking the same kind of information. How it's being sent down can be totally different also. I always figured there could be a stand-alone so to speak that would -- take the 950 - 1450, strip all that stuff off and then re-present it to the IRDs into the I-F input, the 950 - 1450. PETER KNOWLES: Well, the only problem you've then got is - - We've even discussed that real briefly What the problem was there is the control of it. How do you do that? How do you then select the channel that you want. What we are trying to do with the existing software. Our approach, if it takes place, is that we don't want to make anything redundant. We don't want to say to people, "Hey, by the way you've got to buy this unit and the you've got to get an upgrade E-Prom. You've got to do this and this." I think that could get too carried away. So what we're saying is, "Hey, we'll do a box that really does integrate into your existing one, a unit that might stand along side, on top of or underneath your unit. This is the best we think we can do for you without making your existing IRD redundant." We are very conscious of that. CALLER: One final thing. I assume Digicipher is going to be like Video Cipher and there is going to be graphics come up and tell you stuff on your picture. I suggest putting an option in so you can turn that bloody thing off because it's awful if you have to call up something for one reason or another and you hit View and that crap comes up. PETER KNOWLES: I understand. We can't actually turn that stuff off ourselves. We could, but we're not allowed to. This is a GI spec. If we try and turn it off, they wouldn't pass the receiver as being valid for the market. All our receivers do have to get approved by the videocipher division of GI. They look at them, check them out and they say if there is a conflict, if there is a graphics conflict, they will reject it. CALLER: That's how they get their best engineering. PETER KNOWLES: They say they don't. (laughter) They say there is a brick wall between the two operations. Who am I to say different? CALLER: YA, Right! Sure there's a brick wall there. Glass bricks probably! PETER KNOWLES: (laugh) I'm not going to reply to that one. CALLER: (laugh). I'm off the line. Thank you.