Hey, guys? Why does all TV go digital in Feb 2009?

to make broadcast HDTV possible. Digital also frees up more bandwidth per TV channel which will be re-assigned to other uses. It also should allow more features eventually, just like digital phone service allows more features than analog phone service.

Digital signals are less vulnerable to weather and no more vulnerable to distance (think of the noise level of a CD vs the noise level of analog tape or a vinyl LP - same principle). The vulnerability to jamming would be identical (more or less).

Analog or digital is a method of transmitting information. UHF and VHF are frequencies ("channels") at which information is transmitted. The TV signal on a UHF channel is identical to the same broadcast on a VHF channel - it's just broadcast at a higher frequency. The difference between analog/digitial and VHF/UHF is kind of like the difference between lyrics and music.

Broadcast TV is still free, and new sets will have the equivalent of the "box" built in. The box is just to allow your analog TV set to display the digital signal, and is a one-time purchase.

Wikipedia has an article on digital TV, which is overly technical and probably not very helpful to most people.

Isn't the picture supposed to be way better?

Mine's already up--the picture is better, much crisper, but when it gets bad it goes into little boxes and you can't even guess what's happening. I don't buy cable, have an antenna on the roof.

is that digital signals carry more data (I think they compress the signal) than analog. So, less frequency is required. That's why my local PBS station now has like four channels instead of one.

Also, the govt. auctioned off the analog spectrum and made some bucks. Although, since it was the US govt. auctioning off to big business (Google got some) they probably did not make as much $$$ for the taxpayers as they should have.

I get my signal from good old rabbit ears. I've not yet purchased a converter box. Any suggestions for the what one to get? I don't even know how many different ones there are. Any help greatly appreciated.

on which converter box is the better one? I get my TV over the air with rabbit ears. Still have not purchased a converter box. Any thoughts on which one is better? Any ideas at all?

Any and all comments and info appreciated.

sorry.

The lobbyist paid a lot of money to force all the analog bandwidth to be converted to digital. Essentially what this allows is reallocation of existing VHF/UHF to allow more "channels" for existing broadcasters and potentially more broadcasters to enter the market. It also encourages consumers to throw out their TVs and buy new ones.

All those small 5" kitchen TVs are now useless. Spare 10" in your basement for when you do laundry or ironing? Useless. Unless you get expensive ($30+) converter boxes.

Digital isn't any better worse than analog, but what is different is that in rural places you can still watch a poor weak signal. It might have static or ghosting, but if you want to live with it you can. Digital has a sharp cutoff. Either you get a signal or a blue screen, or you buy expensive antenna or boosters.

But it all comes back to encouraging throwing out TVs and buying new stuff. The govt program restricts the "free" converters to regular existing TV quality, so hooking those into HDTV is useless. It may be that over-the-air broadcasters will provide HD signals and people have to go buy $100 converters and new TVs.

I got a converter box and watching OTA is much, much better. The digital is much better than the analog one the same network broadcasts, and I get and extra PBS station. You DO need one of those old rabbit ears / analog antennas with the boosting though to get all channels good and clear.

There are good websites that show what direction the broadcast antennas are and it really helps to align the "rabbit ears" to the right direction.

Digital signals are no better / worse than existing analog. They are on the same VHF/ UHF stations and technically you need lower signal levels to work.

I haven't kept up with the new TV broadcast standards, so I don't know what they've actually implemented. Also, I can't get broadcast TV where I live, and if I could it would be from a low power repeater - those are likely to remain analog - so I have no way of knowing how it compares when broadcast. I did have satellite TV which was all digital for about 7-8 years, and the quality was uniformly good.

Digital could give you better picture quality in some ways. What it won't do on your current TV set is change the number of lines that scan on the screen to make up the picture (or change the number of pixels if you have LCD, etc), so improvements in picture quality won't be huge unless you buy a new TV. But you could see better contrast, more "sharpness" or things like that.

That digital can be compressed is an excellent point, but my bet is they don't compress it for TV - too much extra computing power and memory needed which would make sets more expensive (I'm guessing).

As far as digital carrying more data - the data capacity of a channel (Shannon's Law IIRC) depends mostly on the signal to noise ratio, which is why dialup modems can't go over 56kbps reliably. Digital signals have inherent noise immunity that analog doesn't have (you only have to distinguish between a high voltage and a low voltage for 1 or 0 for digital, vs. a more precise voltage "measurement" for analog), so you can get more information down a channel in that sense (that probably needs an "all things being equal" or some other qualification).

In theory though, an analog signal contains more information, because in digitizing it (and almost all TV and radio signals begin as analog) you lose information due to sampling error. The analog signal can represents tiny fractions of a volt that the digital signal can't distinguish - whether a human listener or viewer can tell or not is another consideration.

I'd guess that this has a lot to do with the switch.