Kudos to Channel 20

Tonight at midnight, Detroit's Channel 20 is turning off its analog transmitter, according to its website and scrolling announcements in both the analog and digital channels. Today was the original deadline, before Congress decided to delay it to June 12 for the sake of a few stragglers. Channel 20 is sticking to the original deadline, so congratulations.

Today I actually tuned in to Channel 20's analog channel for the first time in months. Channel 20's digital transmission has been so good (sometimes reaching the 80s in the signal strength meter) that I have never had to fall back on the analog channel as I've often had to do with other channels (yes, I'm talking about Channel 7). My tuning in to 20-0 was purely out of curiosity, to see something for the last time. My Dynex TV has a signal meter, and it presumably goes from 0 to 100. But I've never seen it at 100. I'll be watching 20-0 at midnight tonight, to see it switch to static. And then I'll switch to 20-1, and hopefully see the DTV signal meter reach the 90s for the first time ever.

The crucible of Channel 7 digital reception

Writing good things about Channel 7's digital reception is likely to jinx it for me. Soon after my post of January 27, Channel 7 digital reception became unstable, at least on my digital television. I have now broken the antenna for that TV in four new places and Channel 7 still doesn't come in. Channel 4 comes in reliably, and Channel 20, unsurprisingly, comes in nice and strong. If only Channel 20 had a quality newscast.

In the analog television in the living room which now has a Craig-brand converter box, Channel 7 came in good until yesterday, when all of a sudden it kept dropping frames on Ugly Betty. After the second commercial break I gave up, turned off the converter box and watched the rest of the episode on analog. It seems viewers aren't the only ones unprepared for the digital transition. Some TV stations still have a hell of a lot of work to do.