June 17, 2009

Paying the "Rural Tax" -- Digital Version

Rural life: the county road is gravel, we have to shoot our own criminals because the sheriff is 45 minutes away, and the well water is free until you have some kind of catastrophic pump failure.

Then came the digital TV switch. I got the converter boxes (one for our house and one for the vacation-rental cabin) weeks ago, but put off facing the inevitable.

Probably these are the only two houses on our road without a satellite dish. But every time I think of paying for DirectTV or whatever, I stay in a hotel and experience "thirty channels and nothing's on."

Call us an "at-risk household."

Before the Utah trip, I installed one at the cabin, which has a large outdoor antenna. It went from getting KTSC (PBS) real well, KRDO (ABC) sort of OK, and KKTV (CBS) with lots of snow to getting KKTV's three digital channels beautifully -- and nothing else.

Back home on the 15th, I put a box on our set, which hooks to a different antenna about 30 yards from the house. "Goodbye, PBS," I thought.

Well, no. Again, there was KKTV, but KRDO, which used to come in all right on the analog signal, was flat gone. No more Desperate Housewives. Sorry, sweetie. But hey, Rocky Mountain PBS, which still thinks that Lawrence Welk and John Denver are cutting-edge entertainment, is looking good. It's a pity that their programming is so tame (or a word that rhymes with tame).

Hurray for Netflix, that's what I say.

5 comments:

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jason said...

Yeah, when channel 11 showed the coverage area for analog vs. digital, the digital was smaller--especially in your neck of the hills.

LSP said...

Haven't got round to TV in parish house. Suffer grievously from having to read, er, books.

Cheers,

LSP

Anonymous said...

We live in S.W New Mexico, on Friday last at 7a.m. we lost our only two stations. The two stations were very helpful, although no signal yet

cliff said...

I think more people should be up in arms. Anolog was the free tv for those that had antenna reception, but lost most of that and local channels when going to digital. Think the satelite folks have a good lobby in congress.

Think the gov. should have required the sat people to give free local channels plus PBS to everyone. If you need more than you can pay so much per channel. I'm stuck because I can't recieve regular antenna signal so have to use sat. but only 3 or 4 channels worth paying for.

cliff