Percival P. Cassidy wrote:
I can no longer find the message, but I'm sure that it was on one of
these two newsgroups within the past few days that I read an allegation
that the move from analog to digital for TV broadcasting was a plot to
push vast numbers of people to cable or satellite because the digital
signal is receivable only over a very small area.

I mentioned this allegation to a broadcast engineer yesterday. He told
me that in fact many people are not getting good reception of the OTA
digital signals and are moving to cable or satellite because many of the
expensive HD TVs on the market have appallingly insensitive antenna
inputs -- far inferior to the almost-free converter boxes that were
distributed over the last couple of years.

Perce

People at dbstalk have complained about the OTA capabilities of DirecTV
DVR's for some time. Many claim the tuners are inferior to the ones on
their HDTV sets. That hasn't been my experience. I've got a 37-year-old
rooftop UHF/VHF antenna and am about 38 miles from Mount Wilson, where
most of the Southern California stations are located. I get excellent
pictures OTA on my main Sony Bravia HDTV set and my smaller Sceptre HDTV
set. I get acceptable pictures on my old Sylvania CRT using a converter
box. I can receive local channels via satellite or OTA on my DirecTV
DVR. The input from my rooftop antenna is split four ways with no
amplifiers.

What looked really bad was the analog signals OTA on the two HDTV sets
before the digital signals took over.