I live in the middle of town and can pick up the local stations' analog signals clear as a bell with a powered, attic-mounted omnidirectional antenna. But even though all of the local stations endlessly tout their digital / HD channels, I can only pick up one or two of them -- but just barely, and they "come and go".

Which brings up another problem with digital TV: a weak or spotty analog signal is usually watchable; it may be a little snowy, but you can at least make out the picture and hear the sound. A bad digital signal is "choppy". The screen freezes up, the sound cuts in and out, etc. making for a very frustrating viewing experience.

Although I understood what they mean, but every time I see the conversion commercials, they DO seem misleading and I can see how people will be forced into buyring a DVR or Digital cable package when it isn't needed.

...I have to really fight my urge to call this a conspiracy concoted by the FCC and cable companies....

@scoosdad: Oh wow, I did not know that. Thanks! Logically, I thought I'd lose those channels since it'd still be an analog signal that my TV needed via the cable line.

I guess if the cable companies informed customers that they'd still offer those channels after the conversion, they wouldn't be able to scare up as many customers.

You may or may not need a converter box per TV if you use an antenna. It depends on your TV. If you have a newer TV it should be fine.
My local stations are testing out the digital signal for a few minutes a week so the people in area can see if it works before the switch in Feb. They tell you that a test is going to happen at such and such a time and if you see us, it means you are ready for the transition.
so in answer to your question, you may need 1, 2 or no converter boxes. The flow chart created is an easy way to find out. Also, if you're not quite sure, ask your TV manufacturer if the model you have is compliant.

@summerbee: @QuantumRiff: @melking: Apologies, it is the 17th. I was thinking of my brothers birthday, which is the 19th. As long as its not on my wifes birthday, the 14th, all is well. Birthdays and DTV, bringing the world closer one step at a time.

If you have an old TV: you need a box.
If you have a new TV: you probably don't.
If you have an HDTV: you certainly don't.

I just downgraded my current service to the family plan on Comcast. $30/month (OTA + select family channels). The only thing I really missed was football in HD.

If you do not have the ability to put up a outside TV antenna for the change- there are few good amplified indoor TV antennae by Terk, RCA (both >50dB amp) and Philips (~30dB amp).

I had an amplified Terk bowtie antenna, the amp did wonders. And the picture from HD was better than any HD signal I ever paid for with Comcast.

Weird to have that degree of complete passivity being considered 'normal.'

Kind of a waste of a life, if one adds up the hours spent sitting doing nothing other than staring at someone elses images.

@krunk4ever: Actually, you don't NEED cable or Satellite now or later. Fact is, the new DTV signal is MUCH better than what you pay for. And it's FREE! The cable companies now have something to worry about. All they can do is mis-inform everyone and scare them to death. Oh, well, nothing new to see here.

Hey Cable companies (AKA Comcast, Time Warner, cox, directv, et al.) Keep mis-informing everyone and duping them to believe they need to "upgrade" to "digital". Keep moving the legacy analogue channels to the digital tier, keep raising the price, keep compressing the crap out of your, so called "HD" signal to where it's no longer HD. Go ahead! Make my day. It just makes me feel better knowing that I've dumped you all already and eventually the government will turn it's big snarly head towards you and regulate you back to where you belong :)

I also thought that it meant that we won't have to pay for Cable TV anymore. Who cares, I watch all my FAVORITE television shows on the internet anyways and with no commercial interruptions. :)

HaHa!! I LOVED the video, thanks!! That old lady is such a cutie, lol. :)

... digital broadcasts are on UHF frequencies but get remapped to the 2-13 numbers we know and love.

@scoosdad

If you get UHF channels now (14-69) then you will get digital channels later... digital broadcasts are on UHF frequencies but get remapped to the 2-13 numbers we know and love.

If your TV is older than 3 years, and you don't have cable or satellite, call the Fed and get a coupon (or spring for the $40... or wait 2 months and get a new 40" TV for the same $40)

If your TV is newer than 3 years, you're good in any case.

And what the hell: if you don't subscribe to cable or satellite the advertisers don't care about you or your trailer anyway.

I think one of the ways this misconception started is the fact that if you currently have cable then you're fine. So people assume that you need to get cable or something.

You don't NEED to get cable, but if you're just barely getting by with rabbit ears, like my mom, then you're probably better off with at least basic cable.

I've been looking forward to that day since I've got basic cable and am paying too much for what is essentially analog signals piped to my TV via a cord. I'll drop it like a bad habit the day after if we're able to decently pick up any nearby digital broadcasts.

It pisses me off since my local cable company (Cox) encrypts their HD channels, and for most channels I don't think the encryption is actually mandated by the provider (with the exception of HBO, Cinemax, etc). Cox doesn't even offer the local channels over QAM!

A cable guy came to my mother's house and almost had her sold on a $60 a month package. She has bad antenna service now, and is worried then when the switch to digital comes she will go from just barely getting some stations in to not getting them at all. (She's heard lots of trees will block digital signals worse then analog.)

Luckily she runs all these things by me and I convinced to at least wait until after the transition to see what kind of signal she really gets. And then if its bad she can go with the basic, local only, package for more like $10 a month. And I told her not to be worried about missing the deal the cable guy was offering, there are always deals on cable if she decides she really wants it.

@snowburnt: the flow chart is a good idea for people that don't get it, except it was irrelated to my question.

it may have been more clear why i was confused if i quote it this way:

"41 percent [mistakenly] think that every TV in a house must have a new converter box".

it ends up i'm not a moron and had understood correctly that you need one per tv. the quote, which i took like this ^, is what confused me. thanks JustThatGuy3 for answering my question.

@alphafemale: and oh yeah it's from TalkShow with Spike Feresten

Here is a hilarious spoof PSA about the digital switch :

[www.hulu.com]

A sweet old lady is terribly confused..

@dragonfire81: I agree it'll be chaos free. If anything it'll be kind of like that Simpsons episode when Marge managed to get Krusty cancelled and all the kids actually started going outside and playing.

@randomizer9: I wonder if rioters would loot TVs...

I think its a government plot to make cable companies more money. Seriously.

No, Canada does not switch over until at *least* 2011. Maybe 2014 for some extremely northern areas. It will be fun watching border cities fight over whether or not Canada should be stamping all over their new spectrum the US has made available to God-knows-who with continued analog broadcasts. Expect a lot of US ads to appears on any Canadian analog service near the border, picking up where the US left off. :)

Personally, I'm very sad we are going with ATSC. The rest of the world uses DVB-T, for which you can buy dirt cheap equipment which works everywhere in everything. *sigh*

Or we'll see a huge increase in new cable or satellite customers.

@FLEB: The channels will all move around. There will be more channels to get with your ant.

the problem is that the digital signal is all or nothing from what I've heard. no faint channel if you are out of range. just nothing. the signal range is like a cliff instead of a slope

You won't get anything in HD of course on those converted analog cable channels but you shouldn't lose any channels at this point. The cable companies are operating under an FCC ruling to keep over the air channels they offer receivable by cable ready TVs until at least 2012.

Are these digital channels at the same frequencies as their original UHF/VHF numbered counterparts, just using less bandwidth, or are they placed in a new position within the overall UHF/VHF section of spectrum?

[hraunfoss.fcc.gov]

and the second is a small update to the main list:

[hraunfoss.fcc.gov]

Column D is their "known" channel number (like the 5 in "News 5"), and column E is the actual VHF or UHF channel assignment following 2/17/09.

It's got all sorts of fear lines, like "old TV sets will no longer work" when it should have said "old TV sets will need a converter." He doesn't even MENTION converters until the 4th paragraph. It's a lousy article.

They start talking about the digital transition and that after Feb, your tv will stop working. Then they go into how in order to prevent this you can subscribe to cable. You don't need a new tv or a converter box then.

While they stop short of claiming cable is the only solution, it still muddies things up for everyone.

Any antenna that can receive current UHF channels will work.

And VHF. This is a huge misconception that all of the digital channels everywhere will be on UHF. There will be a digital station on every single VHF channel after 2/27/09, somewhere in the US. Analog channel 8 in CT is currently running in digital on VHF channel 10, for example.

And if your local digital channel is currently on UHF, that's no guarantee that it will stay there either. Some of the digitals currently on UHF are there only temporarily, and will move back to their original VHF channel assignment once they are able to shut down their analog transmitters on those channels. In Boston for example, 7-NBC will move from UHF back to VHF 7 after the cutover. New Hampshire channels 9 and 11 are moving back to VHF as well. So if you're putting up a new antenna on your roof, you may need one that pulls in VHF as well as UHF depending on your local market. Reason for them moving back to VHF? Primarily, it's that in most locales, VHF can go the same distance as UHF but on far less transmitter power, and therefore huge electricity cost savings to the station.

Also if you scan for digital channels now and get the box set up, you may need to re-scan after 2/17/09 because a few of the UHF channels will move around within the UHF band also. Depends on your location. And as danep mentions below this comment, most of the digital channels on the air now are running at reduced power and won't be at full power until after 2/17 or even beyond that date. So if you can't get that channel today, that doesn't mean you won't after 2/17. YMMV.

Has anyone else had this issue? What was the resolution?

Your mom rocks.

I currently use rabbit ears to receive over the air HD. Or rather the UHF loops part of the antenna.

When television goes all digital in February they will also be boosting the signal strength as there will not be any analog channels to interfere with.

Depending on your distance from the antenna you may or may not need a better antenna.

I have a big antenna on my roof that was there when I bought the house. When my DTV went out, I plugged it into my (analog) TV and was able to watch the 4 regular channels we get here.

But if my DTV goes out, I don't think it will hook up to my new TV. The cord isn't long enough. I'll just have to watch TV online. LOST will be back by then.

Hopefully the LOST picture will look better after the 19th. On my new TV it looks like crap!!!!

Can someone answer this for me??

I have regular analog TVs hooked up directly to cable TV. No set top boxes. And I only pay for the over-the-air channels.

Would I need to pay for set top boxes if they are sending digital-only signals through the cable connection?

There's all this "the sky is falling and your life will be miserable if you don't act now to save your precious TV" kind of stuff everywhere and it bothers me.

I really don't think there's going to be a bunch of chaos come Feb. 17.

@rkaufman: I'm talking mainly about the local network affiliates, including even CW. At least twice every half hour during the afternoon broadcasts. The local news teams do the best job at it--all of them come on for 30-second spots and explain it very clearly ("if you have cable or satellite, you're fine"). I assume that's not the case everywhere, though. Your poster is a good example of ambiguity for the average joe.

So as usual, the government fails and the private companies do a pretty good job.

It looks like the various interests out there are putting out commercials that explain things from their point of view, or the specific solutions that they have, but end up making the big picture muddy for most people.

What average person understands "Full-power analog broadcasting"? Why didn't they just say "Your TV will stop working if the following conditions are true"? Oh, right, because it's the government and they don't know how to communicate with ordinary people.

The CSR actually TOLD her that with the digital transition she would absolutely HAVE to have cable. Mom told the CSR that she'd buy a radio.

Mom got that rate lowered, but is it any wonder people are confused?

As one who's been assigned getting my 89 year-old grandfather up and running, I got a kick out of this.

@se7a7n7: Any antenna that can receive current UHF channels will work.

This has been the biggest government PR/PSA campaign I've seen in my lifetime. Not a day has gone by in the last 18 months that I haven't heard something about it.

Seriously, at this point, not knowing the detail on this is like never having heard of 9/11 or something.

@snowburnt: Laugh it up, but that is an excellent teaching tool; clear as a bell and absolutely impossible to misunderstand.

@EricLecarde: Is it the 19th? I thought it was the 17th, which is my birthday. And our digital signals are terrible in my area, and I do NOT appreciate it as a quarter-century birthday present.

@unobservant: Well... it only affects you if you pick-up american stations over the air across the border.

I actually thought that was the case because there are so many "Digital/HDTV" antennas being sold. I was going to buy one for for parents for Christmas but did a quick google search to find out that ANY antenna will work to get HDTV signal.

@fjordtjie:

If you have a TV that gets its signal via antenna, it will need a converter box, unless it already has a digital tuner built in (unlikely unless it was bought post-2005). One box per TV.

But am I going to need a special antenna? In the old days I would have rabbit ears on top of my TV and I could get by with a fuzzy picture. My friend bought a new digital tuner TV with a similar antenna and rather than snow, the picture just freezes and stops for a few seconds.

I have cable TV and split my signal about 6 ways with quality splitters and premium cable. And by quality I mean professional grade I found on the web. I balanced the signal loss properly. Time Warner Cable has installed new coax from the box in the yard into my house. My analog tuners may have a slightly fuzzy picture at times, but my digital tuners will just freeze for a few seconds when the signal is not strong enough.

So while you may not NEED to get cable or satellite, you may need a big antenna on your roof.

Up here in Canada, the only time I hear about this is when I watch American TV. They aren't giving out coupons here or anything.

As part of my job, I have to repeat this to senior citizens at least 15 times a day. I can only imagine what its going to be like on Feb 19th when the switch finally happens. People blame us for it.

"and 41 percent think that every TV in a house must have a new converter box, even those that are already connected to cable or satellite"

don't you need a converter box for every tv if you don't have cable or satellite? am i one of the 41%? i get that you won't need one at all if you have cable or satellite, but am i wrong that you need 2 if you have 2 tv's and neither cable nor satellite?