“Still have any regrets about leaving?” he asked.

“If I did, I’m over it now,” I said. We both chuckled, but the humor was bitter.

The reason for his call was news of the latest purge at The Sun. More than 60 staffers bought it this time, including many of the paper’s most experienced editors — not the big salaries at the top, but hard workers who knew their jobs, knew their community, and knew how to cover it responsibly. My friends and colleagues.

Nor was this a buyout — it was out-the-door-Charlie, with extra security guards manning the entrances. A few of the surviving managers delivered the news with some grace, but two sports writers and a photographer learned they had no jobs when they got heave-ho calls in the pressbox at an Orioles game. Members of the copy desk learned about it when they showed up for work and couldn’t sign on to their computers. Dilbert in real life.

Sure, I know that The Sun’s parent Tribune Co. is in bankruptcy, but would it have cost the creditors a penny to show even a smidgen of class?

Or was it true that Tribune had to fire people before May 1 because that was the start of the vacation season, and they would have owed everyone another week’s pay? That will really bail the company out of a $13 billion hole.

Anyway, with the staff at less than half the size it was a few years ago — and shrinking every day — it’s hard to see anything more than a death spiral for The Sun — and other papers in the same fix. The less news you print, the less reason people have to read you — online or in hard copy.

My new boss at MedPage Today asked me where I thought newspapers were headed. I wish I knew. Specialized news and education sites like ours may thrive in the new order (and I have to say it feels good, for the first time in years, to be part of a business that’s growing, not shrinking). But for old fashioned, general circulation news organizations, the future looks bleak.

For the gory details about the latest goings-on at The Sun, I recommend The Real Muck, by my ever-feisty colleague David Michael Ettlin. For a frightening glimpse of Tribune’s plans to homogenize local newspapers from the tower in Chicago, visit Charles Apple’s blog.

For those who haven’t followed these posts, I joined a mass exodus from from The Baltimore Sun last August after 38 years in newspapers, and began looking for, shall we say, new career opportunities. Meaning new job.
It took a while, but I finally found one in daily journalism: this time in a medium that’s strictly online. I’m deputy managing editor of MedPage Today, a site that brings the latest breaking medical news to an audience of doctors and other medical professionals, as well as ordinary folks who want straight, accurate, informed reporting that hasn’t been dumbed down.

Although I was medical and science editor of The Sun before my departure, MedPage Today is a lot more intense. First, there’s the subject matter, which is more technical and focused than our coverage at The Sun. Second, there’s the Beast That Always Needs Feeding. I’m talking about The Web. Instead of fixed deadlines, the Web demands constant updating — which really brings me back to my roots at the late and lamented Evening Sun, an afternoon paper with five editions that we fed all day. It was fun then, and thanks to the talented people I work with, it’s fun now.

I am also a real telecommuter for the first time. World Headquarters of MedPage Today is a skyscraper in Little Falls, N.J., a New York suburb off the Garden State Parkway with a spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline (if you ride one of the glassed-in elevators or you’re the boss and have a corner office). While a hard core of news, production and business staffers work there, other reporters and editors are scattered around North America — from Toronto to Cleveland to Wheeling to Houston to Washington to San Jose. And of course, in Baltimore, where my commute consists of heading downstairs to my office in the basement.

Telecommuting definitely has its ups and downs. On one hand, I miss the cameraderie of the newsroom; on the other, I don’t miss spending two to four hours a day commuting by car or rail, like a lot of folks who live in Baltimore but work in the Washington area (where the jobs are these days). What has amazed me is how well a small but complex news operation — one that posts lots of audio and video recorded by a far-flung staff — can operate using the Internet and telephones.

This missive is to let you know that I haven’t given up on technology — I’ve been writing about it for a quarter of a century and don’t plan to give up now. It just took me a while to switch gears and get comfortable in a new setting. Henceforth, I will do my best to keep up the same flow of misinformation, disinformation and bad advice das readers have enjoyed so much over the years.

Only than a week after House Republicans blocked a four-month delay in the nation’s switch from analog to digital TV broadcasts, Democrats revived the measure Wednesday and pushed it through the lower chamber, assuring that millions of analog TVs will not go dark on Feb. 17.

By a 264-158 vote, largely along party lines, the House enacted a Senate-passed measure extending the deadline until June 12. The Obama administrations supports the bill and the President is expected to sign it quickly.

The wording allows local broadcasters to turn off their analog transmitters before June 12 if they notify the FCC and the public well in advance. Most have been broadcasting on both analog and digital transmitters for more than a year now, at considerable expense, and few have budgeted for the extra kilowatts they’ll need to keep both signals going through the extension.  But it’s doubtful many stations will jump in advance of deadline and risk losing a chunk of their audience to competitors who keep both transmitters humming.

O’Bama administration officials say the delay will give them time to deal with  3.5 million households on a waiting list for $40 government coupons to help them buy converters for their old TVs. The $1.34 billion transition program that provided those coupons has run out of money, and the government has to wait until outstanding coupons reach their 90-day expiration date before it can issue new ones to people on the waiting list.

Analog sets that depend on antennas to pull in over-the-air signals are the only sets affected, but they’re the sole source of TV in about 19 million homes. A disproportionate number of those are occupied by the poor and elderly.

TVs hooked up to cable, satellite of fiber optic services won’t be affected immediately because those providers will continue pumping analog signals for several years, at least.

This means the cable and satellite services are carrying political water for the government, which would have faced lynch mobs if it forced the entire country to buy new sets or converters boxes. Remember, thre was absolutely no public demand for the change. Is there any connection between this cozy arrangment and the virtual impunity with which cable and satellite providers can increase prices? And did I mention that millions of homes with cable and saellite service use also antenna-equipped TVs on second or third sets in kitchens, bedrooms and rec rooms? So they’ll have to spend money to replace or convert them even though they already pay the freight for cable.

By the way, this is the first time Congress has declared a technology obsolete by fiat, and the government hasn’t handled the switchover very well. When the FCC adopted standards for color TV after World War II, it chose a system that was compatible with the black-and-white sets that were just beginning to make their way into American homes. When it increased the number of channels in the 1960s by adding UHF frequencies to the TV spectrum, it didn’t eliminate broadcasts on the old VHF frequencies (channels 2 through 13) — it merely mandated that all new sets have UHF tuners.

This change is an entirely different animal –  the result of a conspiracy (if you will) between the government, wireless network providers, broadcasters and the consumer electronics industry to pick our collective pockets by forcing us to buy something we didn’t want and didn’t need: digital TV.

The reason is that the radio spectrum occupied by analog TV broadcasters has many possible uses. It’s particularly good for cell phones and other wireless transmissions because signals on these frequencies carry so well. With a new digital broadcasting system, local TV stations can broadcast  at least four times as many channels as they do now — or produce a mixture of new channels and high-defnitition broadcasts. So the broadcasters get the opportunity to transmit a lot more shows and sell more ads (assuming anyone wants to buy them).

Meanwhile, because digital transmissions are so much more efficient than the old analog system, there’s plenty of room left over for wireless providers to get their hands on prime real estate for new services. Cable TV has already pioneered this territory: think video porn direct to your cell phone. Verizon and AT&T alone have already bid $20 billion for their pieces of the newly-available spectrum.

Meanwhile, the consumer electronics industry got the government’s blessing to foist an entirely new generation of digital TVs on American viewers. True, they’re a lot better than the old analog sets, but nobody really cared. They never wouldn’t have gotten to market if the American government hadn’t made perfectly good, existing TV technology obsolete.

Even this might have been okay if the billions of dollars that Americans consumers and broadcasters were induced to spend actually did some good here. But outside of the minium wage ”sales associates” who peddle these things in Best Buy and Wal-mart, the money we’re paying goes to foreign manufacturers and workers — further crippling our balance of trade.

So where’s the public good in all this? Somewhere along the line, U.S. police, fire, national guard and other “first responder” agencies were supposed to get a chunk of the newly-available radio spectrum for their communications. But the only part of the whle scheme the FCC concocted for this — a proposal to build a public/prive network that first responders could use in emergencies — got no interest from serious bidders.

So what we have here is the perfect public ripoff. I’m sure that after the government figures out a way to give away a few hundred million more to help the old folks buy converters, the switchover will occur. What most people don’t realize is that digital transmissions may look better on your TV, but they don’t travel as far, and they’re more prone to interference from hills, buildings, towers and other objects. Once the switchover occurs, a lot of viewers won’t be able to get the channels they were getting before, unless they’re willing to buy new antennas (more money overseas) or switch to cable or satellite. Like I said, the perfect ripoff.

Want to know more? The Los Angeles Times has done a good job covering this subject. You can find links to more than 1,000 other stories on the DTV postponment by consulting our good friends at Google.

The measure, already approved unanimously by the Senate, had plenty of votes to pass in the House under normal circumstances. But yesterday’s  215-to-168 margin, largely split along party lines, was shy of the two-thirds majority needed to pass the bill immediately as a special measure.

If House Democrats backed by the Obama administration decide to try again, the measure delaying the switchover till June 12 could come up again next week as a regular bill – with passage virtually assured. If it doesn’t, the analog TVs in an estimated 6.5 million households will become doorstops on Feb. 17 when broadcasters turn off their analog transmitters in favor of a new generation of digital broadcasts.

Congress set the official Feb. 17 deadline back in 2005, when it also established a $1.34 billion program to provide $40 coupons to help Americans offset the cost of converter boxes that will allow  existing analog TVs to receive digital broadcasts.

This was not exactly an act of largesse, considering that the entire switchover scheme was forced on an unsuspecting public in 1996 by a bipartisan cabal of lawmakers, bureaucrats, cell phone companies, broadcasters and overseas TV equipment makers who saw an opportunity to pick our pockets in the name of technological progress. There was virtually no consumer demand for digital TV, and the most of the billions of dollars consumers have spent on new digital equipment to deal with the switchover have gone to bolster the bottom lines of foreign manufacturers — and increase an already staggering U.S. trade deficit.

Making a bad situation worse, the coupon program ran out of money — or depending on how you look at things, the program can’t use a big chunk of the money appropriated for it until unused coupons it has already issued reach their 90-day expiration date. New coupons can then be sent to millions on of Americans who found themselves on a waiting list, but few are likely to get them by the Feb. 17 cutoff.

Most of the 6.5 million households that will go dark are occupied by the poor and elderly. These constitutencies haven’t exactly turned out in droves for Republicans in recent elections, which may explain the GOP’s willingness to cut them off. In fact, Republicans opposed Democratic attempts to provide more money back in 2005 when the transition legislation was enacted. So it seems ab it strange that a group of GOP lawmakers has sponsored a bill providing an extra $250 million for converters now that it’s too late. Conscience money? Or am I just a cynic?

On the other side of the issue are most of the nation’s commercial broadcasters, who have been transmitting on both analog and digital systems for years and are anxious to turn off their expensive, power-hungry analog equipment. Many haven’t budgeted money to continue dual transmissions after Feb. 17 (although a lot of skeptics like me have predicted just the kind of imbroglio that’s now occurring).

Caught in the middle are the nation’s public television stations. Like their commercial counterparts, they’re spending big bucks they’d rather use elsewhere on electricty to keep both broadcast systems running. But since the elderly make up a disproportionate chunk of their audience (they love PBS news and watch it over analog TVs with antenannas), public stations are likely to suffer the largest proportional loss of viewership when the switchover actually occurs.

Meanwhile, no one knows how many millions of sets — either native digital models or analog sets with converters — will lose at least one of the stations its owners now receive. When you get to the bottom line, digital signals aren’t as powerful as analog broadcasts — and they’re more subject to crosstalk and interference from hills, towers and tall buildings. In my tests with a variety of equipment in several locations around Baltimore and Washington, I couldn’t find a single combination of TV, indoor antenna and coverter box that consistently brought in all the digital stations that were available in analog. That may generate even more complaints than the lack of converter boxes.

Stay tuned!

The whole issue could turn into a nasty, partisan political battle if Republicans continue to oppose an increase in funding for a program that provides coupons worth $40 each toward the purchase of converter boxes that allow traditional analog sets to receive digital broadcasts. GOP lawmakers blocked attempts by Democrats to fund the program at higher levels when the established it several years ago. Now that money has run out (after coupons worth $1.34 billion were been distributed), millions of applicants who want them are stuck on a waiting list. There’s almost no way Congress can act in time to get coupons to them before America’s TV stations turn off their analog transmitters and switch to all-digital broadcasts on Feb. 17.

 That’s one reason why the Obama transition team has asked Congress to delay the transition past Feb. 17:  lawmakers established that deadline with legislation back in 2005 when plans for the switchover were finalized. So far, ABC is the only network to ask for a reprieve, but with the prospect of millions of sets going dark next month, they’re likely change their tune soon.

Here are the latest converter stats from the National Telecommunications Infrastructure Administration:

 Approved households that have applied = 25,332,945
Coupons requested = 47,412,320
Coupons mailed = 43,052,609
Coupons expired = 13,394,773
Coupons redeemed = 18,858,516
Coupons on wait list = 948,657
Coupons active = 10,799,320
Average daily orders last 30 days = 265,507
Average daily orders last week = 360,759
Participating retailers / Locations = 2,366 / 34,417

Meanwhile, the government and broadcasters are quietly stepping up attempts to convince viewers to consider buying new antennas to use with digital TVs and converter boxes that get signals over-the-air. The government offers no help for that, even though it may cost vany viewers hundreds or thousands of dollars for an outside antenna they’ll need to bring in the same channels they got before.

 The weekly DTV transtion press release I get from the National Association of Broadcasters offers this suggestion: “By moving your antenna to a spot just three feet away from where it currently sits can greatly improve your DTV reception.” It didn’t work in my trials. A lot of people are going to be very upset when they turn on their converters or new digital sets and realize that a lot of their old channels have disappeared. That’s because digital signals get bent out of shape by hills, buildings, towers, high bridges and other manmade objects. If you get signals over-the-air,  with an antenna, check out www.antennaweb.org for advice on buying a new one. Stay tuned (if you can).

Will you lose your signal?

Yes, I told you so. If you’ve followed my rants on the subject, you’ll remember my prediction at the transition to digital TV – just five weeks away as I write this – would be a disaster in the making. Well, that prediction is coming true.

After months of assurances from government agencies and industry flacks that plans for the DTV transition were going great guns, President Elect Barrack Obama has asked Congress to delay the switchover, now scheduled for Feb. 17.

The reason: millions of perfectly good analog TVs will go dark because they can’t receive the new transmissions and won’t have converter boxes attached. Those are boxes the American public has to pay for – and a $1.34 billion subsidy program to help viewers buy them has run out of cash with more than 7 million households still at risk.

Why does Congress have to act? Because it enacted a law in 2005 ordering broadcasters to turn off their analog transmitters on Feb. 17, 2009, and thereafter to deliver programs solely on new digital transmitters. Until now, local stations have been broadcasting both signals. Without a deadline enshrined in law, the cabal of legislators, regulators, broadcasters and TV makers who dreamed up this malodorous public policy knew that local stations would never get around to turning off their old transmitters – a move that will alienate millions of viewers who may never come back.

Don’t get too worked up about this yet. Chances are good that at least one TV in your house is safe. That’s because the transition only affects viewers who get their TV the old fashioned way – over the air, with an antenna (rabbit ears or external). About 80 percent of American homes are hooked up to cable, satellite or fiber TV services that will keep delivering analog signals after the transition and well into the foreseeable future. But that leaves around 19 million homes that rely strictly on over-the-air broadcasts, millions more with cable service that have additional sets in bedrooms, guest rooms, kitchens and other locations that still use antennas.

The Washington Post reported that almost 7 percent of American homes aren’t ready for the transition, and they include disproportionate numbers of the poor and elderly. The former may not be much of a political force, but old folks vote in droves. If their sets go dark, they’ll be forming lynch mobs and looking for legislators to blame.

The situation is particularly galling now that a program to provide households with two coupons worth $40 each to defray the cost of converter boxes is out of money. It has a waiting list with more than a million names on it, and the government is sending out new coupons only as existing coupons reach their 90-day expiration (and that’s another horror story). For many viewers who do have coupons, the subsidy won’t be enough. Most converters cost $50 to $80 – more than the value of the coupon. Worse yet, because digital signals are more subject to interference from terrain and buildings than analog broadcasts, millions of viewers will also need new antennas. These aren’t covered by any subsidy, and external antennas can run hundreds of dollars installed.

With so many other serious problems on the front burner – including a tanked economy and escalating violence in the Middle East — it’s no wonder the Obama transition team is willing to punt on this issue and delay the transition until it can straighten out the mess – if it can ever be straightened out.

“With coupons unavailable, support and education insufficient, and the most vulnerable Americans exposed, I urge you to consider a change to the legislatively-mandated analog cutoff date,” John Podesta, co-chair of the Obama transition team, wrote in a letter to Congress.

Joel Kelsey, a policy analyst with Consumers Union, noted that his organization has joined chorus urging a delay, calling the handling of the program “a giant miscalculation by our federal government.”

Although broadcasters are tiptoeing around the issue, they now have a 30-day grace period after Feb. 17 to continue broadcasting analog signals. But this so-called “analog nit elite” has one huge restriction: the only thing broadcasters can transmit is information telling viewers how to deal with the transition.

First issue of PC Mag

Sadly, this scenario is likely to play out more often as time goes by. With advertising fragmented by the Internet  and cable TV channels, with young readers abandoning print for online publications, and with the cost of paper and distribution increasing too fast to be offset by online revenues, it’s a wonder that only a handful of magazines and newspapers have abandoned dead trees altogether so far.

As an editor whose former newspaper is a shadow of itsself these days, but at least still available in print, I bleed a little every time I read one of these stories. True, I am a wired guy — moreso than most people my age — and I read more news online than I do in print these days. But there’s still something satifsfying about sitting down with a real, honest-to-goodness printed paper or magazine and enjoying it with a cup of coffee at the breakfast table, or in my easy chair at night. I’m sure I could do the same thing with a tablet PC, but I still like the feel of paper. Various studies also show that people read faster in print than online, and retain more of what they’ve read.

But it doesn’t matter, because for many publications, the economics of print just don’t work out any more. Over the years I watched PC Magazine slowly waste away as advertisers and readers dropped out. It cut back publication from twice a month to once, and its final issue was just under 100 pages.

But I also have to note that the magazine’s reason for existence is less compelling than it was. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was a responsible voice of expertise in a technology industry that was exploding with new applications for the new IBM Personal Computer and its clones (IBM actually coined the term “personal computer,” quite accurately). PC’s reviews were throrough and rigorous; the magazine’s labs developed benchmark tests for hardware and software that became industry standards. So influential was the magazine that some hardware vendors rigged their circuit designs to detect when PC Labs tests were running and produce faster results than they ever could in real world applications. Catering to a variety of audiences, the magazine provided programming tips for geeks, sound tech advice for general users, comparison grids for corporate purchasing agents, and yes, a lot of hype about a lot of products that turned out to be vaporware or just plain duds.

Unfortunately, the industry isn’t nearly as exciting as it was 15 or 20 years ago. For most users, PC’s have become near-commodities. In the says when a computer cost $3,000, consumers were likely to look a lot harder before they leaped. Today, $500 buys you a solid computer and $1,000 buys you a great one. Factor inflation into the equation and today’s PC is only a step above an impulse buy. The only people who really care about what’s in them are gaming enthusiasts who need the performance and corporate IT types who have to support and repair them. When Dell, HP, Sony or Lenovo come out with a new model, it’s about as exciting as Whirlpool announcing a new dryer. The real action today is in online software (Facebook, cloud computing applications and illegal file sharing), and in mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry. Indeed, read a recent print issue of PC Magazine and you’ll find an inordinate amount of space devloted to to phones, large screen HDTV sets, and digital cameras. So moribund is the PC market that the magazine has taken to reviewing Macs.

Online outlets (Including pcmag.com, the company’s excellent Web site) also offer something print editions can’t — instant access to late-breaking news. Printed magazines have lead times measured in weeks and months.

Enough of this tale of woe. For PC Magazine subscribers who love print, there’s one bright spot — PC Magazine will deliver a print-formatted electronic copy to your e-mailbox every month. So you can read it on your PC,print all of it, or just the handful of articles you want. To misquote the great John Updike, it’s “progress with an escape hatch.” Visit http://go.pcmag.com/subscriberservices/

Happy Holidays to all!

Now Richard isn’t a fool — he’s a retired financial executive for a big computer outfit – so he clicked on the “No” button. But that wasn’t good enough. He soon found his machine slowing down to a crawl, infected with a piece of slimeware now known as Antivirus 2009.

This is one of the nastiest little bugs I’ve seen, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s distributed as “scareware,” a term describing the pop-up “warning” boxes that lure Web surfers into downloading the malicious software by telling them their machines are infected.

These warnings are almost always bogus. If you already have an antivirus program installed, don’t worry - chances are very good that it’s taking care of business. It will generate legitimate warnings from time to time, but they will always look the same, and they certainly won’t appear as chintzy Web windows.  Antivirus 2009 is particularly insidious because its name sounds legit - in fact, it’s meant to be confused with the legitimate and popular Norton Antivirus 2009.

Another problem: clicking anywhere in the popup warning screen, even on a “No” or “Ignore” button, will often download the malicious program. You won’t even be aware of it. Typically the click will transport you to a Web page advertising antivirus software. Merely visiting the Web page can trigger the dirty download - without any further action on your part.

If you get one of these popup warnings, there are two ways to safely get rid of it. Under no circumstances should you click anywhere in the box. Here are two alternative techniques for closing suspect boxes:

• Click on the “X” in the upper right hand corner of the border of the popup Window - that is, if there is an “X” to be found.  That should close the window. But be careful. Some creeps put phony “X” boxes just inside the border to fool you. That means you’re actually clicking in the window and downloading the malicious software. Some programmers have figured out how to pop up windows that don’t have shutdown boxes at all.
• Use the Windows Task Manager to close the offending window by terminating the underlying program, namely your Web browser. To begin, hold down the CTRL-ALT-DEL keys simultaneously. The Windows Task Manager will appear. Click on the Applications tab and you’ll see a list of running programs. Click on any entries that mention Internet Explorer (or whatever browser you’re using) and hit the End Task button.

If the pop-up warning window has not disappeared, try this - it takes a bit longer and may be more confusing if you’re not used to tech tweaking, but it is by far the safest and most reliable way of getting rid of a suspect Web pop-up: Click on the Task Manager’s Processes tab, which will display a list all processes currently running in memory (some will show up two or three times).  Look for any lines where the Image Name is iexplore.exe. Click on each instance to highlight it and then click the End Process button.

If you do find yourself infected with Antivirus 2009, your best bet is to contact a professional troubleshooter. This bug one is a really nasty customer. It looks for spyware removal programs and terminates them before you can launch them. It hides its own files in variety of locations under different names, and some of them are very hard to delete. I spent an hour or so trying to get rid of it on Richard’s machine, but I eventually ran out of time. I finally advised him to take the computer back to the local consultant who had allegedly made the machine secure and tell the guy to do the job right.

Although it often seems like a losing battle, the Federal Trade Commission is trying to crackdown on scareware operations. In Baltimore, a U.S. District Court judge has ordered six defendants to shutdown scareware businesses that have netted $100 million so far, according to the FTC. Read read Tricia Bishop’s excellent accounts in The Baltimore Sun  on Dec. 13 and Dec. 18.

Some stations are even running half-hour shows discussing the DTV transition and telling viewers how to buy and install converter boxes for their existing analog sets. Others are telling people how to find new digital TVs with tuners that can receive the new signals on their own.

All these ads make the process look deceptively easy, but unfortunately, it won’t be easy for everyone. In fact, after Feb. 17, a small but significant minority of viewers will never again be able to get the same variety of programming they get now. Some will have to spend hundreds of dollars for rotating outdoor antennas to match the reception they get today from the $3 rabbit ears that came with their old analog TV sets. Even then, the dirty little secret of digital broadcasting is that it won’t reach as many TV sets as the analog system we’ve used for the better part of seven decades.

First things first: if a set is hooked to a cable, satellite TV or fiber optic service, it won’t be affected by the switchover. These providers will continue to offer analog signals to their customers for a several years at least. But up to 20 million homes rely strictly on over-the-air broadcasts — and they’re disproportionately occupied by the poor and elderly. Even more may have cable service, but not in every room. Millions of these homes have secondary sets with antennas in bedrooms, kitchens, dens and rec rooms.

My 89-year-old mother-in-law inhabits one of those homes - or more precisely, an apartment on the 11th floor of a building in Chevy Chase, Md., just outside the District of Columbia line. I’m being specific here so you’ll understand that Jenny doesn’t live in a “fringe” reception area, but smack in the middle of metropolitan Washington.

Like many apartment houses, this one does not provide a cable feed in every room - just in the formal living area, where Jenny doesn’t have a TV set, and in the adjacent bedroom, which she uses as a den and where she watches most of her shows.

The problem arises because she likes to watch the news at night while she’s eating at the kitchen table — a habit shared by millions of Americans. For years she has used a 13-inch portable set with rabbit ears. Since the kitchen is smack in the middle of a well-constructed apartment house, the reception there was never perfect, but Jenny could get every Washington channel well enough to see the picture and hear the newscast without straining. That was okay: because of the apartment’s floor plan and construction, it would be prohibitively expensive to run cable into the kitchen.

Because I worry about these things, I decided to see how Jenny would fare under the new digital regime. So I bought a digital converter box from Best Buy and hooked it up to her old TV. Instead of using the rabbit ears that came with the set, I attached a new, powered RCA rabbit ears antenna advertised as being HDTV-compatible.

Bottom line: after a couple of hours of finagling the antenna, I could never receive digital broadcasts from more than 5 of the 8 major stations, and often fewer. I couldn’t get the digital broadcast from Maryland Public Television at all, although the DC public stations were usually available.

On the old analog set, the stations were all available, even if the pictures were snowy. But digital TV is subject to the “fall-off-a-cliff” effect. Unlike analog tuners, which will display the best picture they can, a digital tuner won’t display an image if it doesn’t think the signal is good enough. So you’ll get a great picture — or none at all. I’m sure my mother-in-law will enjoy this improvement when she can’t watch her favorite anchor on Channel 4.

Nor will it help to fiddle with the rabbit ears till you get something watchable. To get a digital tuner to recognize a station at all, you have to put it through a scan of the entire spectrum - a process that can take 5 to 10 minutes. If a station doesn’t show up, you have to adjust the antenna, run another scan to see if it works, then check all the other stations to see if any of them dropped out because you’d moved the antenna to get the first missing station. Then, if you do lose another station, you have to position the antenna again and run yet another scan to see if you can get the other station back, and so on, ad nauseum. It’s infuriating.

Being a troubleshooter by nature, I figured Jenny’s problem might lie with the converter box. I mean, how much can you expect for $40? Since the picture on the old TV was a bit faded anyway, I bought a nice new flat panel set, which would also occupy less real estate in her cramped kitchen. I brought the 15-inch LCD model at Best Buy, hooked it to the antenna and guess what? Even with its new, and presumably better, built-in tuner, I had the same problem. The new digital TV displayed a great image when it found a digital station, but it couldn’t ever find them all.

Since the set also has an analog tuner that does bring in every channel, Jenny has been only marginally inconvenienced so far. But she asked me what would happen after Feb. 17, and I told her she was likely to lose two or three channels in the kitchen. The problem is that it’s impossible to tell which ones. That’s because half of Washington’s stations are broadcasting digitally on temporary frequencies. They won’t change to their permanent frequencies until the day of the switchover.

Because digital signals are more subject to physical interference than analog transmissions, there’s no way of knowing just how bad things will get. Also, because many stations are still broadcasting digitally at half power to save money on electricity, some of the problems I found may go away on Feb. 17. Or not.

Homeowners may be forced to spend hundreds of dollars on external antennas to get the same stations they get today for nothing — but at least there’s a good chance that will solve the problem. In millions of apartments like my mother-in-law’s, where external antennas aren’t an option, viewers are just out of luck.

If you think this is a rotten state of affairs, you’re right.  It’s the result of an unholy alliance between broadcasters, government and TV manufacturers who decided to fix something that wasn’t broken and get you and me to pay for it. Read more about the transition on my DTV Q&A page.