Thursday, March 20, 2008

Ordered Your TV Converter Box Coupons Yet?

We received our 2 coupons last week. For those people that still get their TV signal from an antenna (Over the Air) and still have the old style analog TVs such as us, will need a converter box to convert the digital signal to an analog one after Feb. 17, 2009. The federal government has a web site where you can order 2 coupons that are worth $40 each to offset the cost of the converter that you will need to purchase. We ordered ours on January 2, 2008 and received them on March 14th. I went and purchased the Zenith DTT900, the price was $59.95 and so with the coupon the real cost was only $19.95. I hooked up the box to the TV was quite impressed with performance. Some of our TV channels display multipath interference, but with the converter all that distortion is gone. Also there is no 60 cycle interference from power lines. That interference shows up as 2 bars with white spots across the screen. Another advantage of watching digital TV is that more channels are available. With the old analog television, each station had one channel to broadcast on and that was it. But now with digital television, there is the capability to broadcast more channels in the same frequency space. Some PBS stations broadcast up to 5 channels. Commercial stations seem to have a channel just for weather reports besides the normal channel material. I'm sure the stations are doing experimenting just to figure out how to use this new capability. But remember, if you get your TV from cable or satellite or already have a digital TV you don't need to do anything. If you have any questions, just leave a comment.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree - compared to Analog, Digital Television is incredible. It actually motivated me to start my blog (http://williambryson.blogspot.com). I think if more people knew what they could get for free with digital television, a lot of people would cancel their monthly cable or satellite bill.

Great post!

Derek (IA) said...

Hi Cymon,

Thanks much for your post on my otahdtv.blogspot.com site, and for plugging my link! I should be getting my coupon in a couple weeks and I will definitely consider the LG/Zenith box - they actually set the standard for the modern DTV chipset to work in areas where there is noticeable multipath on the analog picture, much like your area, and for $60 retail, I'd say that would be the best bet. Thanks for the info - keep posting and telling it like it is!