If you go to Ground Zero in New York City today, you will see encouraging signs of construction. Sometime next spring, the steel skeleton of the Freedom Tower—the centerpiece of a five-tower complex being built where the Twin Towers fell six years ago—will rise above grade.

That is good news for the city's broadcasters. They lost their principal broadcast antenna site when the North Tower went down on Sept. 11, 2001, and they have been struggling to replicate the coverage they enjoyed there ever since.

Current plans call for moving on to the 408-foot broadcast mast atop the Freedom Tower, a mast that would bring its overall height to a symbolic 1,776 feet.

But completion of the Freedom Tower is still four years away, and that presents a big problem for broadcasters in light of the analog broadcast cut-off date, which is now less than a year-and-a-half away.

Today, most of the city's broadcasters have been able to restore analog service to an acceptable level from antennas squeezed on to the mast atop the Empire State Building, but they have been unable to also lay down adequate digital signals from side-mounted antennas.

“We suspected that [digital] was going to be bad. And when we finally measured it, we found it was as bad, if not worse, than we feared,” says Paul Bissonette, the former GM of Tribune's WPIX New York, who now serves as president of the Metropolitan Television Alliance, the consortium of broadcasters formed to tackle their common tower and antenna problems.

“Of course, it varied station by station, different antennas, different positions, slightly different orientations, but the digital signals from Empire are terribly deficient,” he says.

Recognizing the problem two years ago, the MTVA asked Congress for help and it responded.

Congress promised to reimburse the broadcasters up to $30 million for whatever interim digital solution they come up with to bridge the gap between Feb. 17, 2009—the analog cut-off—and that day in 2011 when the Freedom Tower finally opens for occupancy.

As Bissonette explains in this interview with TVNEWSDAY, the interim solution the MTVA is now counting on is a new technology called distributed transmission, which calls for an interconnected network of low-power transmitters and antennas rather than the conventional single big-stick approach.

The technology is still unproved, he says, but the MTVA members have high hopes for it.

An edited transcript follows:

How may people rely on over-the-air broadcasting in New York?

Depending upon who you believe, it could be anywhere from 7% to 10% of the viewers that depend entirely on over-the-air television.

That may not sound like much, but, in a market the size of New York, that translates to anywhere from a million to a couple of million people. That's more people than a lot of markets have total people. And if you can believe the research, there is another 20% of the market, another two to four million people, who may have cable or satellite, but who have second or third sets that are over-the-air dependent.

What's the situation on the Empire State Building today?

All of the MTVA members' analog facilities are located there. With a couple of exceptions, all the digital facilities are there too. The digital exceptions are [NBCU/Telemundo's] WNJU, which is located on the Richland tower in West Orange, N.J., and [Univision's] WFUT, which is on the 4 Times Square building.

I know the digital signals are a problem, but how is the analog service?

The analog signals are not bad. They are adequate. We've got people out there in the over-the-air audience who are getting some stations just fine and some stations poorly or not at all. But, as they say, analog degrades gracefully.

Tell me about the distributed transmission you are looking at as an alternative for digital. How would you describe it?

We generically refer to it as the DTS solution. I guess you could call it a cellular approach. It takes the signal from the Empire State Building and basically creates a network of low-power sites all over the marketplace. We could be talking 15 to 20 low-power sites to fill in all of the areas where the Empire signals are deficient.

And where are you in that process now?

We are very close to beginning a prototype testing system. This will be four sites in Brooklyn. Brooklyn and Queens happen to be the area that is most deficient in terms of digital signals. [Editor's note: MTVA is working with the engineering consulting firm of John F.X. Browne & Associates. This Thursday, in Tech One of One, TVNEWSDAY will discuss distributed transmission in depth with one of its developers, Merrill Weiss.]

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