Rethinking Television
Sam Aurelius Milam III
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All
progress is change but not all change is progress.
—Sam Aurelius Milam, Jr.
Not
blind opposition to progress, but opposition to blind progress.
—John Muir
Progress
is our most important problem.
—Bob Donselman
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After
a good many years of using cable TV, I recently switched back to using
an antenna. Most people will wonder why. The only advantage
that they might perceive is one of cost. I didn't keep a strict account,
but I expect that the project probably cost about the same as a month or
so of the cable bill. After that, it's free. So, cost is, indeed,
an advantage.
Many
people will bemoan the smaller number of channels that are available with
an antenna. There is that disadvantage. I never tried to count
the number of cable channels that were available, but the channel numbers
went up into the thousands. I doubt if there's anybody on the entire
planet who needs that many channels. I never watched more than about
six of them. Using my antenna, I get about 8 to about 24 channels,
depending on conditions. I don't watch more than about six of them.
When I made the change to antenna, I lost a few good channels. I
regret the loss, but I'm getting by without them. It's more likely
now that I'll turn on the television and find that there isn't anything
on that I want to watch. That's okay. There are a lot of other
things that I can do besides watch television.
Another
disadvantage of using an antenna is that the signal strength varies according
to conditions. However, that turned out to be educational.
It brought to my attention a disadvantage of digital broadcasting, as compared
to analog broadcasting, of which I'd previously been unaware. For
a large part of my life, I watched programs that were broadcast using analog
technology. With analog broadcasts, a weak signal is still usable.
The picture might be faint or fuzzy, but you can still watch the program.
A weak digital signal is useless. It's either a screen full of colored
squares, a blank screen, or, more likely, a false message announcing "no
signal". The message is false because there is a signal. It's
just a weak signal. With analog, you can still watch the program.
A weak analog program is preferable to a missing digital program, and vastly
preferable to a digital program that keeps switching on and off, throughout
the program.
The
change also brought to my attention a disadvantage of the present channel
selection system. Previously, back during the days of analog broadcasting,
I could just select a channel and watch the program. If there wasn't
a station broadcasting on that channel, then it wasn't a problem.
I could just select a different channel. Things were a lot simpler
back then. See my article Ding-a-Ling
Design, in the November 2017 issue.
By
the way, on Tuesday, May 21, 2019, Dingaling
II, the kitchen timer mentioned in Ding-a-Ling Design, broke.
I couldn't fix it. Thus, its useful operating life ended after about
52 years, a remarkable achievement in an age of forced obsolescence.
On Friday, May 24, 2019, I acquired Dingaling
III, a simple, spring-driven kitchen timer, similar to Dingaling II.
Sometimes, simplicity can still be found.
Anyway,
selecting channels today is unnecessarily complicated. I can't just
select a channel. I have to run a channel setup procedure first.
That procedure scans, looking for channels, as if I'm not smart enough
to find them for myself. It makes a list, inside of the television.
The television refuses to show any channel that isn't in its list, even
if the channel is available and I manually type in the channel number.
In fact, the television will refuse to show any channels at all until I
run the channel setup procedure. I can't manually add an antenna
channel number to the list. I'm required to use the channel setup
procedure. The same thing is true for video machines as for televisions.
Maybe it's an anti-antenna conspiracy within the cable establishment.
Maybe it's just stupidity, of which there seems to be an abundance.
Indeed,
the designers who established the channel setup procedure must have been
nitwits. When I run the procedure, predictably, it misses a few of
the weaker signals. It doesn't add those channel numbers to the list.
The next time that I run the procedure, it misses a different few of the
weaker signals. If it would just add missing numbers each time, then
that wouldn't be so bad. I could run the procedure several times
and accumulate a complete list of available channels. The nitwits
didn't design it that way. Each time that I run the procedure, it
erases the previous list and starts over from scratch. So, I never
get a complete list. The whole idea of requiring a channel setup
procedure is stupid. It should be optional. I should be able
to just select a channel. Given that they made the procedure mandatory,
they should at least have made it work correctly.
It's
even worse than that. My antenna is pointed toward Atlanta.
So, I have Atlanta channel numbers in my list. If I was to rotate
the antenna toward Athens, then my TV
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June 2019 |
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