SAT KRAK 2004 FAIR

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It was plenteous – SatKrak 2004. Several dozens of showrooms, seminars, discussion panels, competitions and quizzes for the visitors, awards for manufacturers. In the era of the Internet professionally organized exhibition can become an attraction to the public.

Antennas installed in the front of fairground buildings are inviting the visitors inside...

Organizers, the publishers of the Satkurier magazine, have used their greatest trump card, their magazine, with its informational articles and their Internet site. They added their eagerness and zeal to their knowledge of the industry. This produced a number of participats from Poland as well as abroad, from Ukraine, The Czech Republic, Slovenia, Germany, France, Romania …

Terrestrial digital TV. There is the right type of equipment, distributors are waiting, there is the technology and money, end-users are waiting … the proble is that none of the TV networks wants to broadcast their programs in a digital version. That would mean doubling the cost of their operation. There is a possibility that local TV stations might start their programing in digital form and this way will mobilize the giants to do the same, said the discussion panel participants at SatKrak, which included representatives from URTiP, Emitel, INFO-TV-FM as well as journalists.

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Award for the best receiver has gone to Ferguson AF3018S – in the picture the whole family of Ferguson receivers

The winner of the award for the best coverter is Golden Interstar GI-201 – unusual colors have been used for this equipment, perhaps, resembling a bit a bathroom decor.

In Dipol's showroom we have demonstrated an entire system from Alcad  for reception SAT and terrestrial programs, multiswitches by Terra, Satrix and Satmatrix more information here. For our visitors we had a guide how to build an installation based on multiswitches which is available here.

Apart from the presentation of the equipment, Dipol decided to prepare a series of seminars and lectures on the construction of different installations in single family houses, multiswitch installations, SAT and terrestrial digital TV reception.
A novelty in this series was a lecture “Analog and digital video transmission”, which had been prepared by the III year students of the Electronics and IT departments of AGH Academy. The lecture was the summary of the students vocational training at Dipol during the summer.

Sat transmission is not limited only to the transmission of TV programs. Filmrec of Crakow has demonstrated a system for dual data transmission via satellites such as Helios and Atlantic Bird. Max. transfer up to 36Mbit/s downlink and 2Mbit/s uplink. This technology, although still expensive, has already found a few customers.

 
Mezon has demonstrated a very interesting meter DTA500 and a succesor of the very popular DSM-10. DTA500 is designed for measuring terrestrial TV signal, cable TV and CCTV signals in the frequency range of 47- 860 MHz, both analog and digital. The most important features of this measuring instrument include:

• Measurement of the level of an audio/video carrier, V/A ratio.
• Measurement of the signal to noise ratio – C/N ratio.
• Measurement of tilt - TILT function.
• Audio listening  (AUDIO) – built-in AM/FM demodulator  

A very interesting selection of SAT antennas from Polish makers. Corab has shown the first Polish antenna made of wire mesh.
Laminas showed a rather boastful dish with its 3m diameter. Portugal SAT dishes have also made it to Crakow.

A very promising group of equipment constitute tuners made by a Polish company, ADB. The ABD engineers have designed a digital TV equipment that has received a recognition from 15 countries and numerous awards like Product of the Year Award for 2003 and 2004 (i-CAN 3100TW – digital TV decoder with an MHP system and the Internet protocol) at Mediacast in Londyn. ADB has sold over 3 million decoders to 15 countries worldwide; Australia, Switzerland, Finland, Spain, Thailand and the USA.
All tuners are built on the MHP (Multimedia Home Platform) – programing platforms that allow to build new applications whcih can be run on the comatible tuners.
MHP makes it possible to create applications for electronic banking or e-mail reception with the use of a tuner. The greatest power of the MHP is its openess since its programs will work on any MHP tuner and they can be created by anybody. If this platform becomes popular, one can only imagine these big groups of fans and hobbists working on programming of these tuners.

Digital TV tuners (similarly to SAT tuners) are becoming standarized, their capabilities are similar to those of a SAT tuner. The simplest device can memorize 2000 channels, it has RF input and output-antenna, OSD in 256 colours, a Euro connector and a RS-232 port.
At SatKrak almost all companies have demonstrated their OFDM tuners. Among them Dipol promoting a tuner combo, DVB-T/SAT DVB-X2005FA A99389 - most parts of the DVB-S and DVB-T tuners are identical, which means that a single device for DVB-S and DVB-T reception could be built based on the 2 tuners. This fact has been utilized here to produce a different solution – it is very useful, because the user can watch SAT TV and DTT when it becomes widespread.

27-29 September 2004. in Crakow during the Satkrak fair  Dipol organized courses for SAT technicians. Participants who had enrolled before the beginning of the course received training materials. The courses took place in the exhibition hall in Klimeckiego Str 14 (Chemobudowa) - conference room 2 (antresola):

27 September (Monday) Crakow
1. Modern wiring of detached homes – Pawe%u0142 Król (1 hour) at 9:00
2. Multiswitch installations – Micha%u0142 Owca (1 hour) at 10:00
3. Digital TV reception and signal distribution - Pawe%u0142 Król (1 hour) at 11:00
4. Multi-user SAT signal reception in appartment buildings – Micha%u0142 Owca (1 hour) at 12:00

28 September (Tuesday) Crokow
1. Multiswitch installations – Micha%u0142 Owca (1 hour) at 10:00
2. Television of the future DVB-T – basics of the terrestrial digital TV - Infotvfm corporation – operator of the digital trnsmitter in Le%u017Cajsko.11:00
3. Video transmission – (among others: modulators, video access in LAN networks, wireless transmission from cameras) M. Dzioch – 12:00

29 September (Wednesday) Crokow
1. Multi-user SAT signal reception in appartment buildings – Micha%u0142 Owca (1 hour) at 10:00
2. Modern wiring of detached homes – Pawe%u0142 Król (1 hour) at 11:00

Webesite of the organizers of SatKrak 2000

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