Over the weekend, the final phase of the United State’s conversion to digital TV was completed—but not without some angst from angry viewers.
For my part, it was a non-issue, since I do my TV viewing via satellite. Even so, I do have an antenna as backup and bought a converter box so that I could experience digital TV via terrestrial broadcast on my aging analog TV. My early testing proved that I could receive and decode these new signals, so imagine my surprise on the day of the conversion I could not view one local station.
Based on online comments, many others experienced the same fate. For me, rescanning the channels did the trick. Others were not so fortunate, as they lived too far away from the broadcast station, still needed to connect their converters—or hadn’t yet bothered to buy it.
Of course, the media was able to find a few malcontents who claimed ignorance of the whole affair or wanted to blame the government for taking away their TV. I even heard one person demand that the old signals be re-instated.
A personal side-note is that Friday evening, I lost part of the vertical deflection on my old TV (which is tech talk to say my viewing area shrunk). Turning the TV off and back on, restored the full display, but it’s happened twice since, which means I will soon be buying a new digital TV—and won’t need the converter box after all.
Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is an author, blogger, and publisher with over 30 years of writing and publishing experience. Check out his book The Successful Author for insider tips and insights.