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Like everyone who has a TV, we’ve been seeing the “public service announcements” concerning the coming change from analog to digital for “Over The Air” (OTA), “Digital Television” (DTV). We got our coupons recently so I decided to make the switch.

As the title of this post suggests, this is a rant. There has been and is a lot of misinformation being handed the public about the switch and it seems to me that both our government and the industry that benefits from our public airwaves are at fault. My opinion is based on my experience buying and setting up the service in our home. It may not be the experience you will have, but I hope at least it will inform some other people about what they could find as they try to switch to digital TV reception.

As a bit of background, I should say we don’t watch a lot of television. We live in an urban area, although it has a suburban feel. We are only three miles away from the city center. We had cable for a while and just found it was too expensive for the actual time we spent watching services other than the local channels we could watch without cable. We watch news in the evenings, a Spanish language station, public television, and the major networks for the most part.

So, when the $40 off coupons became available, we signed up for two (the most you can have). Several months later, we got them and they sat on the desk for a while. And so the first thing to understand – the coupons are only good for 90 days after they were issued (no matter when you received them). There are a lot of industry “pundits” saying you should hold off using your coupon because better converters will be coming out “real soon now.” From what I have seen I have to say – I seriously doubt it. My suggestion, get your coupons and use them.

When I decided to use mine, I first looked on line for reviews and consumer experience on which might be worth getting. The list of “eligible converter boxes” is quite large. There must be some that are better than others I thought. I found a lot of variance among the few reviews I could find, but I found fairly good results for the RCA model. Walmart lists at least two brands on their website, if you can find the listing. The RCA model I was interested in was among them.

I went down to Walmart and after looking for several minutes, I found a display model sitting on the shelf. I asked a sales person where the boxes of converters were to take to the register. “Oh,” he said, “we don’t have those in stock very often. All the TVs we have include digital tuners.”