Patrick’s Rants

(Updated 5/6/08)
Our “coupons” for DTV convertor boxes arrived on Saturday. My wife immediately went out and bought one at the local Radio Shack. It was the base model of course, but what more did we need? What more indeed.

Here’s the thing. Since we live in Flagstaff we are on a “translator” or a type of repeater antenna for stations that are in the valley - Phoenix. Translators are not required to switch over in the same time frame as the station itself, so while the station may be broadcasting in DTV format, they are under no apparent requirement to convert for those of us in outlying areas.

We get several stations off air here:

• 2: the local NBC affiliate
• 13: a Spanish language station, also local
• 14: translated from PBS 8
• 28: translated from “My 45″ the wholly-owned Fox baby station where they air the stuff that’s too racy for Fox itself
• 30: rinky dink local station that’s kinda fun once in a while
• 39 & 48: translated from 10, Phoenix based Fox 10 affiliate
• 50: translated from 5, Phoenix based CBS affiliate
• 52: translated from 15, Phoenix based ABC affiliate
• 54: translated from 3, Phoenix based independent

And there’s a religious channel in there as well, but I always deprogram it so I can’t say which channel it is.

After plugging in the DTV converter box we got two channels; local 2 and the spanish language station. I decided to hop onto the web sites of the TV stations to find out when I could see the new digital stations. Here are the results of poking around on each station’s web site.

I first tried the Fox affiliate: the very creatively named: myfoxphoenix.com. It has Javascript from five or six other sources and I have NoScript running in Firefox. Gack! I couldn’t find anything on the switchover mentioned so I fired off this email:

My family lives in Flagstaff and we recently purchased a digital converter box for our television in anticipation of the switchover to all digital programming in February 2009.

Since we are on a translator here we are unable to tune in Fox 10 using the box. According to the web site operated by the digital TV program, translators are not required to switch on February 17, 2009. I have been unable to find information on your web site that indicates when communities such as ours would begin receiving a digital signal.

I would greatly appreciate knowing when the translator here will be switched over.

As an additional note regarding the functionality of myfoxphoenix.com I found it extremely frustrating and painful to navigate the web site. I use Firefox with the NoScript plugin to minimize my exposure to malicious programmers such as has been discussed in these articles:
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/04/hundreds_of_thousands_of_micro_1.html
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001427.html
myfoxphoenix.com not only depends heavily upon Javascript it also uses Javascript from many other sites. Although there are links to non-Javascript pages I was unable to perform a search that would return anything other than a blank page. I had to use Google to search for your DTV page. At least two other Phoenix based broadcasters have made the DTV switchover prominent on the front page of their site. This makes your site far less useful to me than that of other broadcasters in this area. If I had been looking for something not specific to your station I would have quickly moved on to one of the other broadcasters’ web sites.

In other words, their site blows for usability. They do get points for trying to link in non-Javascript pages, but they didn’t work so well. I had to submit my email question online and got an immediate response which reads in part:

Thank you for your email to MyFoxPhoenix.com Due to the high number of e-mails we receive, we may not be able to personally respond to your questions. However, be assured we have read your e-mail carefully, and we appreciate your time.

The last part kills me, there wasn’t time to “read your e-mail carefully”, it was an automated answer.

Next up, the ABC affiliate. I had to use their search box to find links to their DTV information but at least it worked compared to Fox.

The email I sent to them was similar to Fox except for the Javascript complaints. Usability was much better.

The CBS site was much better and I let them know:

…I would also like to note that your web site makes it easy to find other
information that is currently available regarding the switch to DTV by
displaying links on the menu.

Channel 3 shows the same generic information as the other sites. It was very easy to find with a link on the front page - I had to submit my email directly through the web interface.
I did get a fairly quick email response (automated of course, but it didn’t state that they already read my email)

Dear Patrick-

We have received your comment and will get back with you shortly.

Channel 8
has a great page that let me check DTV status by County.
Although they don’t have a schedule available (just like all other stations) for when it will be available they did have the cleanest interface (still Javascript…) of all of the sites that I tried. (and My45 had DTV links that landed on Fox 10’s blank Javascript enabled page )

I probably need to either get the analog pass through enabled tuner or work out how to configure some kind of switching device(s) to put in between everything else so I can still watch digital TV, DVDs and - ahem - the VHS tapes that I still own.

---

Update 05/06/08
I just received a human response from KPHO’s John Merrill, Director of Engineering. It will be interesting to find out how long it takes the other stations.

Patrick:

As it stands now, Flagstaff will be converted sometime before May 09.

Regards,

John

So a little later than February 17, 2009.