Tuesday I spent all day traveling to Monroe, Utah. Ed Ridges, Jeff Egly and I went to talk with Kent Parsons. Kent has worked with KUED since the early 1960s. He's made a career of taking free TV to rural Utah. And Kent recently announced that he will be retiring in May.

It's this sort of day that really makes my job great. I get to meet with interesting people, talk about interesting projects and see new and interesting technology. Cool.

My first contact with Kent was a couple of years ago, at his home in Monroe. At that time he gave me a quick course on the state of translators in Utah. Nation wide there are about 6000 translators. Over 600 of those are located in Utah. The major question Kent was working on at that time was figuring out how to deal with High Definition Television over these translators. He had already answered the big question. Translators could handle HDTV signal with very little modification.

Having enough frequencies was the big problem. The Feds are auctioning off all the channels above 51. And then the big problem was that stations could not use adjacent frequencies. Meaning that to meet the translator needs the rural locations would have to come up with twice as many frequencies as stations. This in an environment where channels are becoming more scarce.

Kent has overcome a big hurdle in dealing with this problem. He showed us, on the scope in his living room, that he is using adjacent frequencies. Then he showed us the stations on his Television. No interference whatsoever. Pretty cool.

We spent several hours sitting in Kent's Living Room, watching television, and talking about the future of HDTV. Kent made several important points.