Digital Television in The Woodlands

This also pertains to Tomball, Spring and probably Conroe, Texas. Today I jumped into this ocean of digits and found that I like it! I sort of stumbled into it by buying a converter and then a digital antenna. Since my daughter was moving in back with us for the summer or even longer, her HDTV was the first experiment. As it turned out, all I needed was a small $30 antenna, just rabbit ears essentially. At first I thought this device did not work, because when I programmed the channels, I got noisy reception just like before. It looked the same - static reception, because we are so far away from the Houston broadcasting towers. But then I tried something, just out of intuition and curiosity. Wow! I found another signal source on the menu of the television set that was digital. The other source was the old analog broadcast method. The world of TV changed in an instant! Now I have perfect reception for those channels which have already converted to digital broadcasting. And when I mean perfect, I mean perfect! Essentially cable TV through the airway!

Expectations are soaring. Could this be the end of cable TV for us? There will be many questions to be answered soon. Will the value of having piped-in digital reception be significantly lowered? I believe so! Now the question for residents in our area will be, "do I need to have the hundreds of channels provided by my cable TV supplier?" Movies might keep us tuned in, but my son has already found an alternative to that. He has connected his wide-band internet to his TV and now watches on-demand streamed movies from Netflix for a fraction of the cost of cable. I just looked at my cable bill which includes about four paid movies. It is $150, but that includes wide-band internet.

What else might be on the plate? I just looked at my $60 bill for a house phone service. I can purchase equipment for less than $300 to move that service to the wide-band internet without any monthly charges. The house phone will have two lines (two telephone numbers) and one will be the same as I have now. There will be free calling to anywhere in the USA and low cost international call services available, as well as all the telephone amenities we are accustomed to such as call waiting, conference calls, and CallerID. In these times of frugality, I can see equivalent or even better service at much less cost.

Technology continues to offer useful alternatives to quality living, right here in The Woodlands. I am looking forward to the new technology television when the local stations all change their broadcast over to digital on June 12th of 2009. I need to find a place to dispose of my antenna in the attic. I have not used it for years but now it will be worthless. It just takes up space. I will research that issue and share the information with my readers... ps ... after receiving a comment from one of my readers below, I have added a reference on antennas.² Apparently the old antennas will work. I will try out ours in the attic and update this article later.

Now the even better news. We have channels available right now which broadcast only in digital and never have been available for analog TVs. The Houston area is large and there is a wide variety of broadcasters available now. Each analog channel can and will broadcast sub-channels in addition to their current analog mainstream channels. For example, we will have 24 hour weather. I don't have that with my AT&T service except for an application they provide, a slow alternative to direct broadcasting. Of course we will not have a DVR service unless we take the broadcasts through a state-of-the-art home entertainment system or equivalent.

I wonder now how far away from the city one can be and still pick up these channels? There is more research to do. We will point our digital antennas South. I am not sure yet how much we might have to tune up direction to pick up all the channels.The standard network channels all will retain their channel numbers. ABC channel 13 will remain channel 13 for example. Some broadcasting may be on different channels until June 19th. I just previewed all available channels and am having a difficult time picking up channel 45. All others seem to be working just fine. There are three sub-channels for channel 2. Channel 13 had a dedicated sub-channel for the weather. They cover more than just local weather, sort of like the weather channel on cable. I noticed some temporary interference on channel 39. Maybe the weather will affect reception. The television set seems to adjust to fuzzy signals when it loses signal. I checked on reception grade using a website ¹ that will characterize the reception expected in any given zip code; it shows we can expect a "strong" signal, so we qualify for indoor reception. There is a lot to learn. We will dedicate one of our TVs to this new technology and see where we will go from here with the others.

References
¹FCC Information
²Antennas with digital TVs