Hacking With Gum

Digital television is supposed to revolutionize how we watch free TV; high definition, interactive menus and crystal clear pictures. Or so they say. In reality, DTV is more likely to drive people away from watching local broadcast stations than anything else. In theory, it’s a great technology that has a lot of advantages over its analog counterpart, but it just doesn’t live up to its expectations. Ironically, DTV’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: it’s digital. Yes, it allows broadcasters to compress HD quality pictures, but it also means that your signal is either on or off. There is no in between.

To be sure, I’m not the only one complaining. So I conducted a little test: I live 20 miles from one of the top 20 largest cities in the US, and according to the FCC, I should be able to receive eighteen DTV stations with a strong signal. I outfitted my analog TV with a DTV converter box and an amplified indoor antenna. My TV is located on the second story of my town house, so the antenna was as high as I could possibly get it without putting up an exterior antenna. I re-positioned the antenna a couple of times, performing a channel scan each time; I then cycled through each channel and noted the picture quality and signal strength of each station. Of those eighteen “strong” signals, only one was what I would consider watchable:

So what do I define as “watchable”? Well, a signal that doesn’t freeze and skip like a burnt DVD every 5-15 seconds would be nice:

DTV Picture Quality

Interestingly, here is the exact same program from the same station, only this time on the analog side. Perfect picture (note that the red horizontal line is the picture refresh being picked up by the camera and was not visible to the human eye) and audio:

Analogue Picture Quality

In fact, nearly all of the analogue signals that I can pick up are watchable; most are not perfect, but even the worst are watchable; clear audio and an intelligible image:

So using the same equipment I have significantly more viewable stations with analog than I do with digital. Now, to be fair, this test was conducted on a cloudy day; no rain, no thunderstorms, just cloudy. On a perfectly clear day, I can watch one or two other DTV stations, but even that says something: if DTV is so badly affected by clouds, heaven help you if you run into any real interference.

DTV is great…when it works. Unfortunately, unless you’re sitting right next to a TV station, it probably won’t work very well. Good-bye local broadcasters, hello Hulu.