In Living Digital

Shortly after 9am today, KOLD News 13 shut down its ancient Harris analog transmitter on top of Tucson Mountain. So long to that heap of circuits that gave our engineering staff so much grief, the one with the nearly-impossible-to-find parts, the one we had to run at less than 10 percent power when water got into the facilities. Only by Providence did our chief engineer find a needed tube for it several years ago, a fix that failed to end all fixes.

In its place is a 300-watt digital transmitter acting as a fill-in device to spread our signal to those areas on Tucson's northwest side not covered by our main digital signal emitting from the antenna farm atop Mt. Bigalow. Two transmitters help, but we will still have black holes of coverage in several areas. So will every television station making the switch to digital on this date.

The government -- or the "gub'mint" if you want to say it that way -- is forcing this switch upon us because our old analog TV frequencies need to be used for new communications purposes to serve public safety agencies, wireless broadband Internet, handheld devices and other things we've heard about but not seen.

But wait -- don't we have all these things already? Our emergency workers already have communications devices. We have wireless broadband Internet and cell phones. Ah, but digital devices that use old UHF TV frequencies are supposed to be more reliable. I hope so. The quality of some cell phone calls has me pining for the days of those analog brick phones. They were ugly and heavy, but dadgumit, they put out some wattage, unlike some of these teeny-weeny phones that must have come from a box of Cracker Jacks. Digital TV has a lot of the same problems. Days of snowy pictures are over, but it means they either come in or they don't. People are finding they have to adjust their rabbit ears from one channel to the next, turning channel surfing into channel steering.

I wonder how hard it would have been to install these new services on frequencies around analog TV stations instead of forcing them off the air. Many low-power analog stations are staying that way under an exception to the government rules, so the nation's switch to digital really isn't complete after all. Some of them have relocated to other frequencies without going digital.

When television went to color in the 1960's, the government didn't put a deadline on the switch. Stations phased it in, and people bought color TV's as they could. When stereo came along in the 1980's, the feds also set no deadline. Digital TV is much more complex and expensive evolution than either of these two changes, all the more reason to ease people through the transmission and work around their viewing habits rather than force a gigantic change.