Brett Winches writes:
> One date   I have heard bandied about is February 10 (or something) of
> 2009.  the feds are supposed to have a plan to assist consumers but who
> really knows what that will be or whether it will come along in time? =20

	You are very close. It is supposed to be February 17 of
2009. If you have a TV hooked up to an outdoor antenna that
can't receive digital, you will supposedly just get snow after
Midnight comes for February 18, 2009.

	If you are on cable, nothing will happen. Actually, it
may already have happened or will happen soon. The cable
companies are quietly changing the way they deliver your local
channels so that you will still get them after 2009. Most are
either converting the digital channel in to analog and
retransmitting that signal down your cable, or they are buying
the same local feed that you can get if you subscribe to Dish
Network or DirectTV. They then convert that in to an analog
signal and feed it down the cable on the same channel you would
get over the air.

	So, you are already maybe getting the digital feed. You
can sometimes tell if it is satellite over the cable if you can
listen to the audio over the air at the same time you are
getting it through the cable. If there is a delay of a couple of
seconds, it is probably a satellite system. If the audio pretty
well matches both the cable and air pickup, then it is probably
still being simply fed as is in to the cable via the head-end
antenna.

	As an example, our cable system in Stillwater, Oklahoma
which is about 50 miles from Oklahoma City and 70 miles from
Tulsa, uses a satellite link for the one Tulsa channel and seems
to still be using off-the-air pickup for all the Oklahoma City
channels.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group