[SBE] analog shut-off day

[jer hill]

Chris,

Sure. My station KTNW, a PBS affiliate, went off in February. Viewer
problems ranged from:

Trying to use an indoor antenna when they needed the strength of an outdoor
antenna

Frustration with finding out that our digital pattern was much more
directional than our analog pattern and through no fault of their own they
would need a high gain outdoor antenna and a tailwind to receive us.

How do I hook up this box? What are these strange cables? Can I still record
off air with my DVD player?

We also had some problems with a translator in our null on our channel that
was causing some viewers near our site to find it harder to tune us in. We
asked for and got the translator to turn off.

Some viewers had us tuned in and then we went away due to the digital cliff
effect and' by the way, all the other stations work just fine... Is your
transmitter on?

Some were trying to find us by swinging the antenna without pausing to allow
the signal to decode. Many were telling us how strong our signal was until
it dropped away interpreting the signal strength meter like we would
interpret an "S" meter.

As far as unprepared viewers, we ran a 30 day infomercial loop on our analog
station that had a phone number to call. Most people had the converter but
some were very confused with the cabling. The longest call I had was about
90 minutes with a lady who was tearing her furniture apart to get at the
cabling in back. She was very confused and I was very relieved when she got
our signal. The strangest was a guy who claimed to be a retired engineer at
the nearby nuclear site who was hot about the right wing conspiracy behind
the switch to digital.

Jer Hill, K2JH

Washington State University
Broadcast Chief Engineer
Northwest Public Television
Northwest Public Radio
Academic and Media Services

-----Original Message-----
From: sbe-bounces at sbe.org [mailto:sbe-bounces at sbe.org] On Behalf Of
chscherer at everestkc.net
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2009 7:18 AM
To: sbe at sbe.org
Subject: [SBE] analog shut-off day

Any stories of problems as stations turn off their analog transmitters? I'm
not asking about the station's ceremony (if any), but rather any viewer
problems? Are the predictions of unprepared viewers proving to be true?
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