Analog TV

Yes and no...

..."Under the Digital Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005, full-power broadcasting of analog television in the United States would have ceased after Tuesday February 17, 2009. To help U.S. consumers through the conversion, the Act also established a federally sponsored DTV Converter Box Coupon Program."...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_television_transition_in_the_United_States

Very interesting. Has there ever been a review on how well these converter boxes work? I never saw one.

I don't know about reviews, but I have been using one of the converters (link below) that were available cheap when the switch from analog to digital TV was made. It's on a TV that we want to keep around because it has a VCR built in, and hate to give up. Reception is okay with an indoor (home-brew) antenna. I get all the same channels using this antenna that I get on my big digital TV and a rooftop antenna (at least 25 over-the-air channels). The reception is not always as good as the digital set, but that's because of the antenna, not the tuner. We have been satisfied with it so far.

Digital Stream converter box

Wow - true old school. Neat. Guess the cable company / satellite dish companies are getting nothing from you. Where I live, I'd be hurting without my dish. The local cable company is abysmal. When I first moved here, I played with an analog TV (in the late 90's) and I get 7 stations, 3 of which are duplicates from a different city, two are pretty weak in signal strength, and that is up in the attic.

Good to hear they put some effort into a device that had limited selling time left. I figured it would be a total piece of junk, because I'm sure the manufacturers assumed this was just a stop gap device.

If you are a long way from the source, you may need an antenna like this:

DB8e

HAARP?

I got two for free at the changeover because I didn't want to replace the old TV sets right away. They basically worked fine, except of course, we were still limited to the analog picture resolution of the old analog TV sets.

That is the opinion of PeterT as well, but, amazingly, he is still using his, which seems a bit strange these days. Digital big screen TV has become, as all electronic gadgets do, affordable after a few years of production. I got burned three times and learned to wait a while before buying the latest trend. (calculator / CD player / Beta tape deck) Wow - reeeeeealllly bad on that last one.

So you just got out of whatever holding cell you were in for the last ten years?

I got a nice collection of TV's with analog tuners out back in my shed. Want to buy one? They're real cheap now.