The Countdown To Better TV
Ever notice in old action movies the time bomb had an analog clock trigger, and today’s movies always have a digital timer? Even movie villains have converted to digital, and with less than 90 days to the big event, it feels like someone cut the blue wire and the clock is counting down at double speed! My days are a blur!
I’ve been with WNCN for 14 years now without a single boring day here. I’m getting more excited over the countdown to 2-17 than I did as a kid waiting for Christmas. We’ve made our list, and are checking it twice!
Maybe my time bomb analogy is a bit harsh, but when the NASCAR number 38 DTV Transition Ford Fusion wrecked two out of three races, catching on fire in one, it might help us to expect some bumps on the track to all digital TV. I have always expected the worst to happen and I am pleasantly surprised and relieved when it doesn’t. I think we’ll be fine judging from how it went in other countries. Just be aware every station has to make changes which affects other stations.
WRAL has the biggest job to convert by changing their antenna on top of the tower. Your OTA receiver may already have difficulty picking them up since they switched to a back-up antenna mounted lower and on the side of the tower. When they begin to remove their current antenna, and install the new antenna, all stations on the tower must shut down which includes our analog and digital signals. Crews can not be exposed to that level of RF radiation, and the only safe way to work up their is with the power off.
The plan is to do it while most people are at work to minimize the inconvenience to viewers. We feed Time-Warner via fiber, so they will continue to carry our HD and SD programming. We do not have a direct link to Dish and DirecTV, or smaller cable systems, so they will be out during the day.
We do apologize for the OTA outages, but it is very necessary for all TV stations to cooperate during the change over. They expect the work to take 8 days to complete as long as the weather cooperates. Hopefully the Government’s prediction of a warm Winter is correct, and the two snow events we’ve had before Thanksgiving was Old Man Winter’s way of getting it out of his system early!
At the moment, expect this to occur beginning around December 10th. I’ll post the exact times and dates as soon as I get them from their engineers.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader or email.
Subscribe to RSS
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment