Convert Your Old TV to Digital and Get FREE TV
This article will explain digital television and how to convert your old television set to receive both HDTV and SDTV signals through your rabbit ears, OTA (Over the Air and Free). For those with cable and/or satellite, your cable company will do all the work for you, but you may find this article interesting as you’ll learn how to get the best HD picture that is free too.
I originally wrote this when Americans were switching over to digital TV. Today, Canadians and people from other countries will find this useful as well. You can still use your old TV and still get free TV — with even better picture than you’re used to now – assuming you don’t live in one of those cities where the analogue transmitters will not be replaced with digital ones with the CRTC’s blessings. digitalhome.ca has a forum and a link that tracks DTV availability in Canada. You can complain to your local television station and to the CRTC if you see your town or area will no longer be served free OTA TV.
What is digital television?
The photo is taken off a fairly new HDTV hooked up to cable of Chandra Crawford, Canadian Olympian, winning the cross-country sprint. However, after I installed an outdoor antenna and hooked it up to the same TV, the HDTV picture at 1080i blew this one out of the water.
In the old days, television signals were broadcast over the air via an analogue signal. Analogue television in North America used the NTSC or National Television System Committee system. Every television came with an NTSC tuner inside, ready to receive and show the analogue signals that your local television station was putting out.
However, a better system emerged. Digital television or DTV. For the purposes of this article, I won’t go into a technical explanation of what digital signals are and how they differ from analogue, but suffice it to say that digital television is stupendously better than analogue in all ways but one.
Standard digital (SD) television provides a clear picture with more lines of resolution than analogue. In the high definition or HDTV version, it provides such clarity that you can see the disappearing puck or the blades of grass on a golf course. Your eyes will like both SDTV and HDTV.
Digital television always provides a crystal-clear picture, except when the signal is disrupted by weather or a blockage. In which case, there’s no picture, no sound. At best you’ll see an unwatchable mirage of squares all merging and moving. Analogue television becomes unwatchable in degrees, which is better when trying to watch a station with a poor signal. Even when the weather is bad, you can still see and hear well enough with analogue to watch your show. Not so for digital. It’s either “on” or “off.” That’s the only way it’s worse than analogue. Otherwise it’s worth the switch to digital!
In the old NTSC system, each station broadcast on a whole-number channel. In the new digital ATSC system (Advanced Television Systems Committee), each station can broadcast several sub-channels under its one main channel because it can go into one decimal place. Huh?
Page 1 of 6 | Next page
