Where the hell did this obsession with "digital broadcasting" come from, anyway?
I was watching digital HDTV (which of course is all we have now) in the over-the-air flavor at a friend's on a 40ish-inch Samsung flat-panel TV. It was tuned to a local station using typical indoors antenna, kind of an updated version of rabbit ears. Distance between the transmitter and receiver was about 3 air miles, station is full-power VHF.
At intervals not exceeding 5 minutes the program was interrupted with intermittent freezing and pixellating, with attendant audio muting. I tried reorienting the antenna without results. My friend advised, "that never helps." I asked, how can you watch this thing? He shrugged and said, "you get used to it."
IMHO this is NOT an improvement over analog. Sure, the picture is fantastic when it works - the problem is, it doesn't work reliably, and the freezing and reacquisition are vastly more disruptive to a quality viewing experience than an occasional ignition streak a la back in the good ol' analog days.
At this location, anyone with a $3 set of Radio Shack rabbit ears would have gotten a perfect, stable analog picture.
It seems digital broadcasting on radio or TV is not ready for "prime time" and may never be.
None of this could have happened if all forms of digital broadcasting had been thoroughly and impartially tested first, BEFORE being implemented. Unfortunately for everyone, it wasn't. It's still all a failed high school science project.
In an emergency we better learn to bend over and kiss ourselves goodbye. You won't get any warning, information, instructions or help from broadcasting or cable. All communications will be frozen, rebooting, buffering, squelched, hissed on, jammed, or otherwise unavailable.
Instead of reasonably reliable and simple analog, broadcasting has traded it's future for overly complex, unreliable digital.
