By now you know that TV is changing next year. Starting Feb. 17, 2009, local TV stations will turn off their analog transmitters and go all digital. If you have an analog TV and get your signal with an antenna, you'll need a digital converter box or your TV won't work. Those converter boxes cost about $60. You can get a $40 coupon from the federal government that lowers your cost to around $20.
A company called Universal TechTronics is running full page ads in newspapers across the country that offers a digital converter box (up to two per family) for free. The headline is a real attention-getter: "Public to get free TV without Gov't coupon!" This is a scam!
One thing that is unclear about these converter boxes is that you still need a vhf/uhf antenna (an internal one that sits on the TV) because some of the channels are vhf and some are uhf. Those run from about $10 on up to $100 depending upon the type you want. Also, each time the antenna is adjusted, you must re-scan for additional channels and you still may not get the same ones you got before. Hope this helps a little!
We also went to walmart for the converter boxes. After we received our cards for $ 40.00. Unfortunatly our local super walmart can only order 4 of these boxes at the time. We ended up driving almost 50 miles to get them at another super store where they had a big display of them. The picture is really clear.
We have one older tv and one "hd ready" tv. I got two government coupons and went to the store. It turns out you are only allwed to use the coupons on the converter boxes that "dumb down" the digital signal for older tv's. If you want to get a box for an hd ready tv that will actually display hd, you have to buy a more expensive box and the coupon is not good toward these. Stinks!
At first, our converter box wouldn't pick anything up either. We connected it to our roof antenna and we were so upset because we got very good reception without the box. Tunrs out we had to buy a small, inexpensive adapter. Ourr antenna wire has 4 wires. It was connected to a piece that plugs into the tv antenna port that had two screw type things on it with two wires wraped around each screw. We had to replace this piece with one that had 4 screw looking pieces, one for each wire. My husband had to experiment with putting different wires on each one and once he got the right combination, we have excellent reception.
We got one for the camp from Sears and it will not pick up anything. I was told our one and only local TV station is already broadcasting digitially. Has anyone else have this problem? We went through all the channels and nothing but snow.
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