DTV is just too fussy when it comes to receiving the signal. It demands a perfect signal or it just won't give you the signal. No degraded picture. Just nothing, period.

Digital TV is perfect for cable because receiving the cable channels doesn't need reaiming the cable to get the signal. You plug the cable into your TV and you get the channels you're paying for.

Digital TV is perfect for satellite companies. Just get a dish, aim it at one of the satellite birds that's transmitting the low wattage TV signals, and you've got a perfect picture...as long as nothing gets in the way between the satellite and your receiver.

You're not moving the TV around while trying to receive the signal while you're at home, so digital TV is perfect for satellite and cable.

Digital TV is perfect for computer screens for the same reason as it's perfect for cable.

Digital TV for outdoor antenna reception, on the other hand, sucks the big one. It stinks! You either get the signal or don't. There's no in-between reception as analog TV has enjoyed. With analog, you get a perfect picture, a less than a perfect picture, some snow, some ghosting, some signal fading, a blizzard picture but with at least some kind of usuable sound, some scratchy sound, or just snow. With analog broadcast TV, you know how close you are to a signal range, or whether you're in the line of sight for weaker and distant signals.

With analog TV, you can drive around in your car with the antenna sticking out. As you drive around from city to city, you lose some stations but gain some others, or some distant stations come in for a while. With analog, it's more fun to discover new stations, whether they're strong or weak. You get all of the stations of all signal receptions. You get some perfect, some not perfect, and some really bad. You can drive around in your car around town and watch (your passengers, that is) a TV show with some variance of signal, but it won't blank out on you like digital TV signals do.

With analog TV, best of all, you don't have to keep rescanning the tuner ever freaking time you change locations. You step up and down from 2 to 69. You dial in a channel and it tunes it in immediately; with digital, you have to wait five seconds before it tells you whether it gets the signal or tells you it failed to receive the signal.

Many channels are gloating how great their digital broadcast signals are. They look fine. It's too bad that they're broadcasting with such low power levels that reception has worsened by at least a factor of 10.

I drove around town for the past two weeks seeing what TV signals the Haier portable TV can pick up. Reception varied from place to place. North of I-8, digital reception from Tijuana suffered. East of Kearny Mesa, reception of VHF channels KGTV and KFMB suffered. The UHF signals came in fine a fair amount of time despite broadcasting with hundreds of thousands of watts instead of megawatts, but suffered severe dropouts, the Max Headrooming effect, and reception failures when you're out of the line of sight.

I got out the Haier and drove to 4565 Ruffin Road to pick up the signal for K09YL-D. It came in fine as long as I was within 200 feet of the transmitter on top of its building. It received all four of the multicasted channels. Virtual channel is 9.x. Couldn't get it outside of the range. 300 digital kw doesn't go far.

Digital broadcast TV needs a lot of work. Low power DTV signals just don't work with portability or at home reception. The so-called full power VHF DTV signals are a crapshoot as reception is limited to line of sight. UHF signals can broadcast with more power than 316kw that the VHF stations are limited to, yet again, reception varies with these shorter wavelengths on that band. Solution. Increase the wattage, build some boosters and translators, and build some portable TV sets that are designed so its far simpler to tune in channel.

Someday, some engineers will come up with something like a broadcast standard that can give you a digital picture when you're close to its signal range, or revert to an analog picture if you're just not getting all of the digital signal. Won't happen in my lifetime. Digital TV blew it big time!