[Mishmash] Warnings & Comments Re: Federal Analog Television Convertor Box Coupons

[William Smyth]

Folks,

I hope my comments will be useful.  I locally purchsed the approved (coupon 
valid) Zenith model from the list included with my coupons for a few 
reasons; A local small merchant (private Radio Shack associate store) who's 
been getting clobbered by a new nearby Wal Mart deserved some support, my 
unit cost about $20 more than the Wal Mart Magnavox box but features 
on-remote picture format setting which was handy for producing a full-screen 
4:3 format image but I can quickly reset it to letterbox format for sports 
and films.
I would have preferred Echostar or one of the Philcos because they have RF 
feedthrough that allows analog signals to be viewed without an antenna 
selector switch or antenna cable swapping.  The Echostar won't be available 
until June after my coupons expire in May.  Only the lower choice Philco is 
available from Amazon.com and I think the better Philco has more options. 
The Echostar price appears to be totally covered by the coupon, the lower 
Philco appears to be priced the same as the Zenith and I guess the deluxe 
Philco ramps up another $25.  I hope I can round up the deluxe Philco before 
my other coupon expires.  Whatever, I'll get a second one of some kind 
before my coupons die. The RF feedthrough feature is intended to allow folks 
in areas with local low power "repeater" TV stations to continue to receive 
them until they are later converted to DTV.  I don't know the power level of 
these stations but they are far weaker than conventional stations because 
they are designed to and licensed to cover very limited areas.

Now for some warnings; they are out there on eBay and some sellers may take 
your coupons, some don't qualify for coupons.  I see plenty of the 
Magnavoxes and Zeniths there and some real cheap ones that might work in 
urban areas.  Be VERY SUSPICIUOS of the coupons offered there.  The coupons 
are issued to be redeemed in your area so merchants may not accept 
out-of-area ones for good reasons.

These converter boxes are actually complete receivers with built-in 
"modulators" to feed into analog VHF TV tuners.  Remember that most VCRs, 
DVD players, game systems and even early home PCs feed VHF TVs through these 
modulators.  These little boxes have a lot of sophisticated technology built 
into them so they're bargains even without the subsidized $40 rebate.  Seven 
or eight years ago at our local dawn of DTV similar boxes with various video 
outputs including VGA sold for around $500.  Today's subsidized cheapies do 
provide composite video plus audio output so they can feed any old composite 
monitor that's gathering dust.  The Commodore composite monitors also had 
audio input so you can cobble up a decent TV using on of these boxes.  The 
same is probably true os some Atari monitors too.  Sorry about most of the 
color Apple composite monitors because they don't have audio amps and 
speakers.

Now for some simple performance comments;  most of the approved boxes should 
work very well with no trouble because they had to meet some specs in order 
to be "blessed".  Like other digital TV sources the picture and sound will 
either be nearly perfect or totally absent.  Goodby snow and annoying 
interference, BUT a weak or questionable signal will break up into blocks 
before blanking out and the audio will degenerate into squaks, squonks and 
other annoying noises before it goes away.

If you have marginal, noisy and snowy pictures on some UHF channels you 
won't get the DTV versions without a better antenna period.

I hope this helps everyone out.  I've understood the basic operation of 
analog TV for over 50 years and am totally mystified over DTV.  I've been 
looking for tech info on it for over 10 years and can't find anything but 
publically available consumer info which has been sparse until very 
recently.

Bill