All the way back in December of 1996 the FCC started chattering about switching all broadcast signal from analog to digital. There are a limited number of analog channels and it was becoming increasingly more difficult to get on the airways at all. Emergency systems (police, fire and rescue) and educational programing were having to fight harder and harder for room. Switching to all digital frees up the airways considerably. Colleges and universities actually have a chance of getting their television stations broadcasted and emergency personnel are granted unlimited channels.
So....the big switch is supposed to aid in getting out emergency broadcasts--crucial information during natural disasters and whatnot. A fair number of people in rural areas have those small little television/radio sets for just such natural disasters. The sets make use of "rabbit ear" antennas. Just the kind that the digital converter box is for. But the box is not compatible with the little sets. So....all of these prepared people now have a rather bulky paperweight. The radio part will still work though, so they have that going for them.
4 comments:
Ha Ha. Now I feel silly for the comment I left because this makes sense for emergencies. I was thinking that is was more like an advertising/consumer thing. But yeah, we've known about this change forever.
I didn't think your comment earlier was silly! Just one more of the ironies of this whole fiasco--the DTV folks ran out of money too! And no one can afford the converter boxes without the coupons and they're frantically printing out more coupons while the older ones have expired because they handed out more coupons than they had boxes for. Who is driving this train?!
Oh, and pathetically they said February so everybody went scrambling to change their set up and trying to get the darn coupon. Then the whole program ran out of money and cannot issue any more coupons and then they pushed the conversion til June. We'll just see about that. So pathetic :(
So then you have families like ours who have existed happily for nearly 20 years with bunny ear antennas and just a handful of channels. We called a year ago, got our coupons, bought the converter boxes last summer, hooked them up no problem...and soon got cable in order to finally have high-speed internet here in the boonies. That's ok...the grandparents needed a converter box for their little cabin in the woods!
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