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Technology Stocks : Acrodyne (ACRO) is one of two pure plays in the TV -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric Hautala who wrote (945)	2/20/1998 10:17:00 PM
From: Donald Kirchner	Respond to of 1319

Eric, Thanks for the work, all of my spare time lately is going into preparations for a course I'm teaching. The FCC announcement included a pretty interesting paragraph: * The Commission permitted DTV stations to operate with increased power or take other measures to improve their coverage. DTV stations will be permitted to increase power, or modify their antenna height or transmitter location, where the requested change would not result in more than a 2% increase in interference to the population served by another station, unless the affected station already experiences interference to 10% or more of its population, or the change would result in the affected station receiving interference in excess of 10% of its population. In addition, UHF stations will be allowed to increase radiated power up to 200 kW and, within their service area, up to 1000 kW, by using antenna beam-tilting techniques, provided they meet the above standard for permissible interference. The way I read this there are going to be a lot of antenna designers at work over the next few years and lots of work for tower riggers putting antennas up and down until every station has maximum coverage. This will probably take 20 years or more to get worked out. Short term, stations are going to want to get a signal on the air and they won't care if the coverage isn't perfect. The ideal customer for the ACT is a station in a top 30 market with an analog transmitter on it's last legs. They need a transmitter anyway and can get on the air with a digital signal almost for free. Worst case is a station with an almost new analog transmitter. They will be loath to throw it away, so will probably opt for a separate transmitter at a different site. How many stations fall in these categories or on the spectrum in between is a job for the marketing department. I notice that the ACRO website questionaire conveniently catalogs information like this. I have no illusions that ACT will be used for all of the adjacent channel allocations, but they certainly are getting looked at. The Yahoos (in the best sense of Gulliver's Travels) have been yowling for a couple days. Remember one of the first principles of high tech marketing, FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt), when your competitor threatens to get an advantage, do everything possible to make the customers think it won't work. Having the competitors say it won't work and isn't good for anything is the best evidence yet that ACRO is for real. If it wasn't for real, all of the visitors looking at ACT over the last month must have been pretty disappointed, and if it has no market, why did they go see it? Don

To: Eric Hautala who wrote (945)	2/21/1998 7:52:00 AM
From: paul boudreau	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1319

Eric, I recommend that you E-mail the company for their view point on this. If you mention that your a shareholder you can usually get a decent response instead of a vague stock reply. It seems that your analysis makes alot of sense to me. Once this breaks it'll go up fast, as we've seen in the past. Hopefully, we'll start getting some sales before the NAB show, but if not I still feel that they are not too far down the road. I E-mailed the 3 national affiliates in Boston and asked when they planned on converting, I only got a response from the ABC affiliate and they said they would be on the air in early '98.