Analog to Digital in San Francisco

Hello everyone. This is Tyler Trauman with Shure market development here in San Francisco. I’m up right now by Sutro Tower, which is only a couple miles away from downtown San Francisco.

And the question we constantly get asked is “Why should I upgrade to digital audio over my analog system?” And with everything that’s going on with the spectrum right now, and things like this in the background, which is cranking out two million watts of power, the spectrum is seeing a lot of crunch right now and space is becoming a premium. So, it always comes down to two words for me: spectral efficiency. And we’re seeing a lot more efficiency with the digital systems.

And to demonstrate this, I’m gonna go ahead and pull a spectrum scan right here. And we’re gonna go ahead and compare analog wireless with digital wireless systems. So right now, I’ve got some analog wireless, and I’m gonna try and get 20 channels online here. So, let’s go ahead and add 20. Let’s see if we get those. Alright we got 20. Let’s see if we can get up to 40. And there we go. We’re kinda maxing out at about 24, 25 channels.

But if I switch over to digital wireless, let’s see how many channels we can get then. Alright, let’s see if we can get those 20 channels. Shouldn’t have a problem here. There we go. We got 20. And 40. So, right there we got 40 channels, which is way past what we were getting with our analog system, but let’s push it. Let’s see how many channels we can get up here. 60 channels. Let’s see if we can get all the way up to 80 channels.

Alright, there we go. We’re getting about 64, 65 channels of digital wireless here, right in the shadow of Sutro Tower, and only a couple miles away from downtown San Francisco. So, it’s really easy to see the premium benefits of good digital wireless. It’s all within that spectral efficiency. If you should have any questions, please feel free to reach out.