Digital TV switch won't offer clear picture to everyone

Digital television giveth -- and taketh away.
Many who already have made the switch from analog to digital TV enjoy a better picture and more viewing options. But for others, the change has left them with worse reception, missing channels or useless portable TVs.
The full transition to digital, which Congress extended from the original changeover date of Feb. 17, will take place by June 12. Then analog broadcasts will cease, except from a few very small stations.
The extra time has given people a chance to get on board with digital TV, which is being broadcast exclusively by some stations and is being run alongside old analog signals by others.
For many, the switch has meant a crisper picture and a flowering of channels. The digital signal delivers a near-perfect image and has room for stations to run several sub-channels offering extra content.
But for many TV viewers, the move to digital has created more headaches than benefits.
Kristina Reaume, a 62-year-old silk-screen artist and legal consultant in Nevada City, Calif., faces the likelihood that all her TV programming will go away. Until now, she has been able to get most channels from Sacramento with varying degrees of reliability.
But with her digital converter box, she gets nothing but a black screen telling her she has "No signal." Reaume, who lives in a mountaintop cabin, is apparently beyond the reach of the stations' digital signals.
"This is going to suck. There's nothing else to it," Reaume said. "I'm going to have to play the fiddle and listen to more radio."
Winnie Yu is an organizer at a DTV assistance center in San Francisco, which is organized by Self Help for the Elderly. The Bay Area region's topography and dense layout pose unique problems for digital TV viewing, she said. Some seniors living in packed apartments in Chinatown find they can't get some of the same channels they used to get with an analog signal.
"Digital signals don't propagate as well and they can be affected by trees, police cars and the weather," Yu said. "If you have a high-density building, you're bound to have units in the center of a building away from a window. Those in the center can have lots of trouble."
FCC spokesman Mark Wigfield said most TV viewers should see improved reception. He said studies have shown that 89 percent of stations will be able to reach more homes, while 11 percent of stations will have less reach after the DTV conversion.
For some people, like Reaume, the loss of reception is abrupt. While viewers who lived on the edge of a station's analog reach might have suffered through some onscreen snow, a digital signal usually will go black if it can't fully reach the TV.
This "cliff effect" doesn't just happen on the periphery. Residents who find themselves caught on the wrong side of a hill without a clear path to transmission towers can suffer the same fate.
Wigfield said the problems are partly associated with the move by some stations from VHF into UHF frequencies, which don't travel well down valleys. Some channels were forced to move because the lower frequencies in VHF are subject to local interference from appliances.
Some problems may be fixed when broadcasters remove their analog transmitters from towers and reposition digital transmitters to the top of the structures, where they can broadcast better, Wigfield said. He added that some stations are planning to boost their digital signal after June 12.
"It's unfortunate if people are having problems, but they may want to give it a try after the transition to see if they have better luck," he said.
That is small comfort for people like Jim Prescott, a retired teacher in San Bruno, Calif. He bought a portable TV to watch replays at San Francisco Giants games. After the transition, his gadget will be as useful as a brick because there are no portable converter boxes for handheld TVs.
"Now, I have to basically throw it away," Prescott said. "I'd like to give it away, but I guess I'd have to give it to someone in another country."
For more information on the DTV transition, go to www.dtv.gov.

(rkim(at)sfchronicle.com)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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