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US Switch To DTV Countdown Begins
s31523 writes "In February lawmakers postponed the switch from analog to digital TV. Now, the new June 12th deadline is upon us with no sign of another delay. CNET is reporting that the President himself has stated, '... I want to be clear: there will not be another delay.' So it looks like it is going to happen, for real this time. Even with the delay, there are still estimated to be millions of unprepared viewers. Local stations may participate in the voluntary 'Analog nightlight' services in which TV stations agree to keep an analog signal turned on in addition to their digital signals to provide information about the DTV transition and to notify unprepared TV viewers of emergencies, such as hurricanes."
More than half the stations broadcasting the "analog nightlight" service will remain on air for 30 days. And the rest will be on for at least two weeks. In total, these stations will reach 69 percent of TV households.
Nope. They didn't just print more money for the coupons. The money came from the people that bought licenses for the freed up spectrum. Part of the fees paid for the license were set aside for the converter box program.
Well, I live in a kind of remote rugged location, and since the switch to DTV my picture is much better. Now my internet access gets flaky when it's windy--lower transmitting tower...
People who haven't yet got a box that is subsidized with a $40 government voucher are too poor or lazy to be valuable consumers. They're probably so poor they don't even pay taxes. Why spend millions upon millions of tax dollars to bring these bottom-of-the-barrel consumers to advertisers when they can't even afford the nearly-free converter? It's not worth it. The overall quality of audiences will be improved for advertisers if we just leave these last few millions of poor people behind.
Edith Keeler Must Die
I did a lot of research on this last year. For what it's worth, I'll offer a few thoughts from what I remember.
First, get an antenna that can handle both UHF and VHF. Some stations will still broadcast on VHF. Ignore ridiculous marketing claims that an antenna is "digitally optimised" or "HDTV ready" or however that went. A signal is a signal. Having said that, from reports, some "UHF-only" indoor/outdoor antennas will actually do okay with VHF signals as well. I wish I'd known that last fact before buying a honking big outdoor VHF/UHF antenna. The "UHF-only" antennas take way less room. In any case, find out where the stations are located physically, and point the antenna at them. If they're dispersed, you may need a motor control to rotate the antenna, which is a pain, or multiple antennas, which is a big pain.
When I finally bothered to hook up the analog/digital conversion box for more than brief testing, and a freaking huge outdoor VHF/UHF antenna *inside* my apartment (it's mounted on a short brass rod stuck in a hole drilled into the end of a two-by-four stub mounted on a large homemade work table, so that it's up near the ceiling), I got channels 8 (CBS), 10-1 (NBC), 10-2 (NBC), 13-1 (ABC), 13-2 (ABC), 21-1 (PBS), 21-2 (PBS), 21-3 (PBS), and 31 (Fox). This is four more channels than for analog. However, channels 8 and 13-1/13-2 are basically unwatchable, with signal levels too low. The picture constantly jerks and pixellates. I hoping those stations jack up the freaking power soon. There are some okay shows on 13-2, in particular. If not, screw it. If they don't care enough, why should I? I watch a lot of DVDs, and there are more okay films on DVD than I can realistically watch in a lifetime, even with only watching each film *once*.
Second, don't get the absolute cheapest converter box. It'll likely have serious problems unless you get fairly lucky, such as sometimes severe audio lag, poor handling of marginal signals, a poor feature set, a tendency to fail early, etc. I ended up paying about $23 per box after taxes, for the ones I bought with the two $40 off coupons sent by the government. If you're interested, these were the Zenith DTT-901 model, May 2008 firmware. One feature I liked was "pass-through", but that obviously will make no difference very soon. I'm not up to speed on current models. Look on video fanatic forums. Odds are good you'll find a decent brand and model for little money. I can't remember if any $40 off coupons are still good, but if they are and you have them, use them for two copies of the same model, so you'll have one on hand while the other is in the shop, if needed. Worst comes to the worst, you can sell the extra copy or give it to a relation.
If you're having trouble with elderly relations, tell them that the little box is a bully and that it has taken over the channel switching. It may sound a bit condescending, but if it works, why not? It's a clearer visual image for them than the obscurity of technical details. Be sure the remotes for them have large buttons and are as simple as possible. Keep the "good" remotes in a drawer, for when you need them to set up stuff. I use myself a nice Sony programmable remote, and it works well, but even I have a bit of trouble sometimes with flipping from one mode to another, whilst managing for example overlapping sound level controls (mainly when playing DVDs that seem to flip a coin when it comes to loudness). Asking elderly relations to cope with this kind of remote fiddliness will be too much if they already have trouble with the DTV changeover with which to begin. It will cause active pain (to you), but discard *everything* except power and start/stop (for DVDs if applicable) and volume and channels for your kindly but dumb elders. If you're daring, explain the fast forward button. One hopes that doesn't overlook anything!
(Yeah, I know about TV Fool and such, but that's been covered in vast detail elsewhere, and I forgot most of it anyway, heh-heh!)
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
They do:
http://www.amazon.com/Channel-Master-4221HD-Multi-Bay-Antenna/dp/B000FVTPX2
(Others should note that the antenna should be oriented 90 degrees from what is shown at the Amazon page; also there are similar antennas with 2 elements, instead of 4, linked on the Amazon page)
An antenna with somewhat larger elements than the coat hanger one will work better, the coat hanger one peaks close to the top of the analog uhf band, which is a much higher frequency than DTV will use.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Time Warner here in Austin has an option for just the minimum: the broadcast channels plus CSPAN or something for (I think) $8.75/month. They don't bring it up a lot. It's at least worth asking your cable company about.
I thought that with the transition, the old analog frequencies were being reclaimed.
DTV is still going to be in the same channels from 2-51. Channels 52-69 were auctioned off. This whole transition was done to pack the broadcasters into a smaller space, among other things. The adjacent channel allocation rules for DTV are less cumbersome than they were for analog. Here in the Bay Area, Sutro Tower will transmit signals on 33, 34, 38, 39, 43, 44 and 45 (that's not the complete list, just the adjacent ones). That was impossible before.
So are they delaying the completion of the transition to allow for this nightlight service?
No. Only stations whose analog frequencies will remain unused and won't interfere with post-transition DTV operations will be allowed to do it.
When will we have our stations at their final frequencies?
Tomorrow.
During a weather emergency, the TV not the first place I go
Unless you're driving, analog TV is (was) the best place to go for weather emergency info because:
for relevant information. Noaa.gov, weather.com, and/or a local AM "News and weather station" are my collective first choice.
Static on analog AM (455-1600kHz) can tell you a thunderstorm is 50-100 miles away. Beyond that I'd say analog AM and FM radio is all but useless. The news cycles are too long, there are too many clear channel and autoDJ and syndicated stations. (I've been there, camping at 4:00a.m., emergency sirens come on, I scan the radio dial for information and here 1940s music, Art Bell, Industrial music and static...)
NOAA transmitters are typical of heavy government, by time a weather event is verified enough to get into the update cycle, it has probably passed you. NOAA transmitters are pathetically weak and placed in locations where their line of sight coverage is abysmal. Cross any great lake and you're likely to pick up TV stations the whole way across but you won't pick up any NOAA station more than 10 miles offshore. (In my case not even this far because the nearest station was about 15 miles inland!) Try this, get one of those TV/weather radios (before tomorrow morning!) scan through the T.V. channels and if you are within 25 miles of a big city, you'll probably get some TV stations and if you hear a NOAA station at all, it will be very weak.
Now here is the rub, not only is digital TV an all or nothing affair which has a wider area of 'perfect picture', but a much smaller area of 'usable picture', but to date there are no portable battery operated televisions capable of receiving a DTV signal. Yes you could run your DTV converter off an inverter, and someone has even created one which runs on half a dozen D batteries, but DTV decoding is computationally intensive which means it burns through batteries much faster than your Analog LCD TV. Gaps in weather and other emergency coverage will eventually be seen as one of the unintended consequences of the government mandated forced obsolescence of analog TV. A second unintended consequence is that millions of TVs will end up in landfills before their time because their owner is either out of DTV range, or he isn't technically savvy enough to hook up a converter. The third unintended consequence is that themanufacturers of new televisions will have a very good year. DTV was sold in the pre-internet days on the premise that it would provide jobs for EEs after the downsizing of NASA and the military. It has provided jobs, but unfortunately very few of these jobs have been within the U.S. And now we're stuck with "the worlds first DTV system" which was designed when MS Windows didn't even have a TCP stack and the 'web' consisted of a few dozen organizations, email and usenet. My point here being that after all of the money spent on DTV, it is within 5 years of being irrelevant thanks to youtube and similar video services and more efficient codecs.
You took me wrong. I was calling the designers of the HDTV converter box stupid for putting the IR receiver on its top where many people will cover it up. I don't blame the grandma at all, no doubt she has been putting doilies on things like that since before we were born.