Southern Maine get's ready for the final "final date" of DTV transtion

Only 4 days left until June 12, 2009 - the new "drop dead" date for all Americans to be ready for Digital Television.

As a common lay person not involved directly with television broadcasting or the television industry, this has been the longest 2 years of my life. When I started writing, investigating, and talking to as many people as I could over 2 years ago, I had no idea what I was in for.

It was a long, arduous journey up to February 17, 2009 when we THOUGHT that analog signals for high powered, over-the-air Television Stations would end. Then, the FCC and the Obama Administration "extended" the drop dead date to June 12, 2009, to give those involved (since 1996) a few more months to get it right.

Even Michael Copps, Acting FCC Chairman, said that the FCC was NOT able to accomplish much and was not able to make much of a difference during the 4 month extension. Why? Well, in my opinion it was "over exposure". The American public was sick to death of hearing about the transition. Those that were going to do something about it already did and those that procrastinated continued to do so.

The FCC and the National Association of Broadcasters have already admitted that there is not much they can do now but wait and clean up the mess (reference Broadcasting & Cable Magazine, June 2009). After June 12 they will start dealing with reception problems. Do you know what that means?

For those who rely on antenna TV it means that the number of stations they received under analog TV will be reduced, in many cases significantly, to one or two if they are lucky. And there is not a single person or agency they can call who will care. I know that because people who visit this site have reported to me on numerous occasions that they have DTV reception problems with the DTV converter boxes. And in calling the TV stations involved, have received little, if any, help at all.

The local TV stations point fingers at the FCC, who point fingers back at the TV stations, who point fingers back at the Association of Broadcasters in their area, who blame the government, who blame the TV stations who blame the public. It is as vicious a circle as I have ever seen.

For those of us in Maine, a large portion (about 14%) of the population rely ONLY on over-the-air reception for television. And it just so happens that a great deal of these people seem to live on the "cusp" between where the analog signal used to reach and where the digital signal will reach.

FCC Commissioner Copps himself has admitted that his own DTV converter box worked fine over this past winter; but when spring came and the leaves came, so did the DTV signal interference. So if we're going to have problems with leaves being in the way, I don't think the State of Maine is where you're going to be most happy with over-the-air Digital TV.

To bring one more layer of confusion, some TV stations will change the channel number from which they broadcast their digital signal on June 12, 2009. I am having a tough time nailing down which channels in Maine will and which one's won't change. From what I can gather at this point here is the run down of the stations I know about in Southern Maine.

(The channel number that is displayed on your screen when you channel surf is called the PSIP; which can be different from the actual UHF broadcast channel)

WCSH (NBC) Channel 6 will remain UHF 44
WMTW (ABC) Channel 8 will change to VHF 8
WGME (CBS) Channel 13 will remain UHF 38
WPFO (Fox) Channel 23 will remain UHF 23
WPME (MYN) Channel 35 will remain UHF 35
WPXT (CW) Channel 51 will remain UHF 43
Maine PBS - depends on where you are. Check http://www.mpbn.net/About/DTV/tabid/251/Default.aspx for details.

For me, the only one of these I need to worry about is WMTW because that's the only channel in Southern Maine that I receive that is changing. So instead of doing an entire rescan (which can cause more problems that it's worth) I will simply manually change my DTV to look for channel 8 on Channel 8.1 instead of 46.1. I would suggest you do the same unless don't know how to do this in which case you better stick with the full re-scan of channels on your DTV device.

Good luck to you all. I have heard there are some things going on at the State and Federal level to help improve signal strength of digital TV but I doubt you will see the benefits of that for many months.

Sometimes, too much Digital TV signal can be the problem

In some recent back and forth email conversations I had with Suzanne Goucher of the Maine Association of Broadcasters, she provided me with some further insight about digital TV signals which is pretty important.

First, one new piece of the puzzle, at least it was new to me, is that if you have very strong digital TV signals it could actually cause a degradation of the signal. It's like the old adage "Too much of a good thing". Ms Goucher, like me, admitted to not being a technical expert on this stuff but provided an analogy that seemed to make sense: "if you think about throwing a rock into the water, you get strong ripples at the center and weaker ripples further out. Now, add in sticks and rocks and boats and other obstacles, and the ripples start bouncing back and forth and overlapping one another or smacking up against the rocks, and it becomes much less of a "straight line" proposition"

She also used WGME as an example and provide me with an FCC Analog map and an FCC Digital map of the digital signal area from the WGME Tower. Note that the two maps are almost identical: (click image to enlarge)

Analog:

Digital:

The last important piece of information that Ms. Goucher shared with me was an article written about 10 years ago regarding digital reception problems. If I didn't know it, I would have thought it was written just yesterday.

Here's the link: http://www.current.org/dtv/dtv815reception.shtml

So there's some good information here. Some of it may help those of you struggling with Digital TV reception and some of it may at least explain why you are having reception issues to begin with.

I'd like to personally thank Suzanne Goucher from the Maine Association of Broadcasters for her commitment to providing information to Maine's population about digital television.