I have already posted about our TV HD converter box perplexities. (See TV and Me.) The big day was Friday, when both our TVs began to snow heavily. The one shown here is our “new” (about three years old) kitchen Toshiba. The living room TV is probably 10+ year old, and neither has given us good pictures since transmission fell with the Twin Towers in 2001. Only WLIW, coming directly across Long Island Sound was consistently sharp. The other channels gave us spots, snow and wavy lines. On a clear day we could see WNBC and WNET pretty well. A couple of retired cheapskates, we rotated our rooftop antenna and resisted cable service.
Friday night the in-house engineer got to work on the living room TV, tightened up all the connections, and voila we were scanning for signals! What came through was WLIW again (but now three outputs), as well as Channels 2, 4 and 55. The shock was how clear they are — not a snowflake in sight. Channel 13 (WNET) officially exists, but the signal is too weak to make a picture. Channels 5, 7, 9, and 11 have gone msising entirely.
Saturday morning we hooked up the kitchen Toshiba to its converter box. Wow! All the channels we got before, plus all those add-on channels, and everything sharp, sharp, sharp. Don’t judge by the picture here which suffers from reflections. I show it because it displays a weather channel I never saw before. Now we will always know when it is raining. Since both TVs feed from the same antenna, it is striking how the newer set can interpret more signals than the older one.
Read this and weep, Cablevision. What with the coupons, this dramatic improvement has cost us a grand total of $40. Plus, maybe we’ll consider getting a new living room TV.
