I can see clearly now....

The digital revolution is comming more and more every day. When I first heard reports of the analog signals going away being replaced with digital I was a little uneasy. Yeah we only have the over the air signal, but we really don't need cable or the dish. There is enough programing on the 4 stations we get to keep us properly entertained, and if not we have quite a good DVD collection. Even if we could afford cable or the dish, I am not sure we would bother with it. Anyway, I heard about these converter boxes a few years ago that would be necessary. I stopped by best buy back then to price one of these things out and it was around $100. I am glad I waited around for a while. The government's plan was to give a rebate of $40 per TV to those poor schlubs like me who only use over the air signals. I call it my government cheese box. I figured even with the rebate it would be costly, but I found one at Walmart for $49. Friday the little rebate credit cards appeared in the mail. I was able to sneak away for some errands on Saturday morning and stopped by to pick up two of these little boxes for our TVs. After looking around a while I finally had to ask where they were, and of course they were right in front of me. I get the boxes home and have to wait for a while until the kids were properly bored with TV to hook them up. I worked on the big screen in the front room with multiple configurations trying to get it to go through the VCR, but couldn't get it to work. Finally I just hooked it up directly and turned it on. It is sooo cool. No more fiddling with the antenna to try and get a good signal for the different stations. All stations come in crystal clear. And I get even more channels than before, including two weather radars and a button that allows me to see the upcoming programing. It's great that I have gotten the boxes early to make sure I got them, but I can see them coming up with something a bit cheaper or with a few more options, but for now I am pretty happy with it. But there are two drawbacks to the cheese boxes. One is that the Fox station doesn't appear, according to their website their digital stuff isn't to full power yet. My question, Why Not? The are promoting the crap out of the digital stuff but don't want to do full power yet. The other and bigger problem is that one of the PBS substations is PBS kids 24 hours a day... crap. We used to be able to tear them away from the TV because the programming stopped, but now we are going to have to keep an eye on how much they watch. The other cool part is that I think I can get away without using an external antenna on the house, but I am curious how many more station I could get with an external antenna.