[Jeffhs]

DTV converter boxes do not work well in my area. That is, they would probably get most of the TV stations from Cleveland but two -- channels 8 and 19, which just happen to be the ones whose subchannels I watch the most. I cannot get these two stations using an indoor antenna and my current flat TV; an outdoor one is out of the question (don't want to mess with anything that big, though I realize I could use one if I wanted to).

All I can say is, I hope my flat panel TV lasts a long time, as I am not looking forward to going back to a CRT set. I think the FCC made a huge mistake in changing the US television standards to ATSC, when we had a perfectly good NTSC standard for well over 50 years. I read somewhere, think it might have been here, that this was strictly "change for the sake of change", with no real reason or need to change the standards; however, the FCC went ahead and did this on a whim.

Don't misunderstand me; I am not completely against ATSC digital TV. As I stated in at least one other post to another thread on the subject, I like the vastly improved picture quality and higher resolution of DTV over NTSC, as well as the expanded programming choices afforded by digital subchannels carried by most DTV stations (my favorites are Antenna TV, MeTV and RetroTV, formerly RTV, all available on Time Warner Cable on channels 8.2, 19.2 and 91.6, respectively). What I did not care for was the FCC's insistence that all U. S. television stations convert to DTV (not necessarily HDTV) by the final hard date of June 19, 2009, and those incessant public service announcements (PSAs) aired by many stations months before the transition that all but screamed at us that "your (present) TV will go black on February 17 (later June 19), 2009!" I'll never forget the ad campaign for the transition run by the Cleveland CBS-TV affiliate on channel 19. They referred to the DTV transition as "The Big Switch", and ran the PSAs for the campaign every chance they got. I never thought they would stop.