Editorial

Digital television offers quality, free alternative

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

You can't beat the deal. Seven clear crisp channels, including at least one in high-definition, for $10.

Not $10 a month; $10 one time.

The deal is probably different at your house, although the price is the same.

If you're a cable or satellite subscriber -- most people are -- the conversion to digital television won't mean much more to you than the annoying messages scrolling across the bottom edge of your television screen.

After Feb. 17, 2009, the message goes, the old analog television system that has served us so well since Milton Berle's heyday 60 years ago will be switched off so the radio spectrum they use can be put to other uses. It will be interesting to see what services come forward to use those frequencies; one of the ideas is a free wireless Internet service.

If your television was built after March 1, 2007, and you don't subscribe to a paid service, you're all set. Plug in your rooftop antenna or rabbit ears, and use the menu to look for digital broadcasts.

If you have an older set, log in to www.DTV.gov to apply for your digital converter box. The government will send up to two credit card-like coupons, worth $40 each, to each household to apply toward the converter, which start at about $50.

Connecting a set of rabbit ears to the converter box and the box to an old television set in McCook the other day, we actually found only five digital broadcasts -- three separate NET signals including one in high definition from the Sutherland transmitter, the CW from Kearney and KSN from Oberlin. Fox and ABC from Kearney were still available on UHF and we couldn't find a CBS signal, although it might still be out there.

We're sure the latter UHF signals will be converted to digital in the near future, although there is a loophole in the law allowing low-power community translators to continue operating beyond the Feb. 17 deadline.

Besides the scan function, which scans the airwaves and saves settings for the broadcasts it finds, another neat function of the converter box we tried is a signal strength indicator that allowed the antenna to be adjusted for the best performance.

You'll be able to enjoy the high-definition signal, of course, only if you've purchased a new high-definition television. On our old recycled former motel TV, in fact, the high definition signal produced rather poor quality audio.

Like the switch from analog to digital cellular phones, a digital television signal is an all-or-none affair. There's either a picture and sound as clear as the best cable or satellite, or there's a frozen checkerboard of broken pixels or a black screen.

Not many of us will want to give up our favorite cable or satellite offerings, but for the casual viewer, someone on a tight budget, or that spare television without its own hookup, it's nice to know a good variety of high-quality digital television is available.

Complete information is available at www.dtv.gov

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