Any reccomendations for a portable digital TV. I am looking for something 'handheld'. Mostly to be used during 'power outages'/ emergencies (like hurricanes). Some TV's only have them on the remote. I like the controls to be on the TV itself. I'd like a decent screen size as sometimes a power outage can last a bit or our direct tv is interupted due to very bad rain. It would be nice if it could be used to watch tv if all of the satellites couldn't get through. As for cost....less than $200. I'm more concerned with quality though a great price would definitely be fantastic. Portability is also important.

Basically I'm looking for any real experience with any of the portable tv's.

Anyone have any experience? Good or bad. I'd like to know any to avoid too.

I think it's a great idea, but other than that I don't have any info.

Several years ago we had a small tornado go through a nearby town. This was on a weekend, and the local AM/news radio stations are unmanned overnight or on the weekends. The only local news was TV, and I had no power. I had a portable LCD battery TV, though, so I had news. This was great. My AM/FM radio was useless.

I've been looking, on and off, for a decent portable digital TV, but the last time I looked I didn't find any great reviews. Maybe now that digital is the only option there will be some new models.

Most of our local news stations have started streaming severe weather coverage or breaking news so we watch it on a laptop if we have to go to the safe room or we lose power. I don't know how long my router and modem will run on the UPS but it seems to be quite a while. The broadband router has dual internal battery backups so it's good for hard wired use for about 16 hours after the UPS dies.

I'm going to watch this thread though. A handheld television would be a bonus but a small, simple LCD television on a UPS with a digital antenna would be easy enough to set up.

ETA: It looks like a USB Digital TV Tuner attached to a laptop might be an inexpensive way to achieve this although most appear to be wired. They seem to be available at the regular tech outlets although reviews appear to be mixed.

In the emergency management world, you learn in training that you can never count on wireline connectivity. You also learn you can never count on wireless connectivity. As a result, you need a plan that includes multiple options.

While I can't go into deep specifics here, ATSC digital television is a poor - very poor - replacement for the old NTSC/Analog system when you're looking at things from an emergency preparedness perspective.

- Much worse battery life (the QAM tuner chipsets were not designed with battery battery life in mind)
- Does not work at all in a moving vehicle
- Much lower real-life signal strength
- More complex user interface necessary for operation

So an ATSC (digital) portable is sub-optimal.

So consider a laptop for your television - stream it over the internet, right?

Well....the curious thing about streaming video media over the internet is that the economics of it are 100% inverted from the over the air (OTA) broadcast model.

In the OTA broadcast model, if you spend $1,000,000 to operate a transmitter tower every year, and you have only one house tuned in, your cost per viewer is $1,000,000. However, if you have 10,000,000 viewers you cost per viewer is only $1.00. This is not the case with internet streaming. Each added viewer ADDS to the cost for the station, instead of reducing it. The net effect is that you don't see a lot of live local television online, and where you do, they are not set up for the needed capacity for a major bump up in use that would happen in the event of an emergency. Not only that, but something called "multicasting" which was supposed to solve a lot of the problems of an increasing need for bandwidth where there is a "broadcast" of the same program never really caught on, and it looks like the upcoming replacement internet protocol (IPv6) which could address and somewhat solve the multicasting problem isn't getting any meaningful adoption rates by ISP's and where it is, they are ignoring the multicasting capabilities. So live internet television is kind of risky for emergencies. Not only that - your phone/cable lines go down, you're out of luck. 3G USB cards that use the cellular network are only barely able to stream live video, and the cell network tends to wheeze and struggle in emergencies anyway.

So, what you're left with is the laptop OTA tuner card as the best choice, for a number of reasons, including that the Laptop can connect to streaming media as well as broadcast media. Laptops are their own UPS as well, and you can connect them to any number of external power supplies.

I've been using Mac laptops for a long time, but you can use any Windows or Mac laptop, and even a low-cost netbook running windows as a kind of all-purpose emergency communications station. I've been really happy with the Acer netbooks, and the Dell Mini-9 and Mini-10 are good too.

In terms of TV cards, anything by Hauppauge and Pinnacle has worked well for me lately.

Oh - one last thing - the ATSC digital television signal is nearly useless in outlying areas where you used to get snowy pictures. I've posted here tales of my failed efforts to get decent signal (massive antenna towers, new coax, rotators). Out here, we lost all but 2 stations, so consider this if you're in an area that used to get weak OTA signals - you might get nothing at all.

Thank you Martin! I should have known you would have a ton of good information on the subject.

We always have the weather radios to fall back on but a good radar image is worth more than a thousand words when a tornado is slicing through the area.

If Martin's post has not dissuaded you, Office Max's website seems to be having a sale of sorts on the TVs you're asking about. They are offering a 7" and 9" Pegasus LCD TVs for $80 and $99 respectively. There is doubtless shipping on top of that.

See: http://www.officemax.com/catalog/sku.jsp?skuId=22071767&cm_mmc=Shopzilla-_-Technology-_-TV,%20Video%20and%20Audio-_-LCD%20TVs&srccode=cii_10043468&cpncode=25-19237420-2

I know nothing about the relative quality of these TVs and have no affiliation with Office Max.

Yuccahead...thanks for the info...i will check.

Martin. As always a ray of light with lots of info. Thank you. For the info and the specifics. I'll look into those. Sounds like the way I had been considering even previous to this post but it just added more reason to look that way.... will still look at TV's.

Walmart has one for $88.00 + $0.97 shipping to home, or free ship-to-store. See http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=12173640. I don't know about the quality. There are USB devices you can plug into a computer, such as http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6-041-_-Product. I've had more success with the Hauppauge TV tuners than others, but still the USB sticks can be buggy and, unless hooked to a good antenna, of limited use even in urban areas.

I wouldn't recommend any cell-phone apps or streaming Internet sites only because if your power is out then it's also likely that power would be out to your nearby cell towers and Internet carrier's distribution equipment, which would make those options unavailable.

There are many good, small AM/FM radios that can pull in distant signals. The Kaito KA1101, KA1102 and KA1103 (http://www.kaitousa.com/radios.htm) are some examples, but units from Eton/Grundig, Sony and others also exist. These particular Kaito units also provide shortwave (amateur/ham radio) reception as an alternate source of information, and are pretty well regarded.

It's my understanding that Analog OTA is supposed to have been discontinued, except for limited, low-power applications. I don't even have an antenna anymore to check. Are there still any NTSC TV broadcasts?



Have you had any success using any of these lower-cost netbooks with USB tuners? I know that just trying to watch HD video streams on my Atom-based EEE-pc can often be unsatisfactory.

No, there are not. Laptop cards are ATSC tuners. Digital.



Yes, but you have to drop the frame rate a bit for 1080 content. Also, Windows 7 is better in terms of resource usage.

It's a darn shame we went with ATSC and QAM here in the USA, because the DTB-T and cohorts used in other countries is so much better and easier all around and addresses things like mobile access.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T

There's also DVB-S2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-S2
With that, you can connect a cheap-o sat dish and still get a signal well out of range of terrestrial signals. It's amusing to me (in a kind of dark way) that I live 2 hours from 2 major cities and my over-the-air reception of television is utterly lacking, yet if you're in the middle of nowhere in any of Europe and much of the Mideast and Asia, for a few hundred bucks, you get plenty of signals from a cheap disk and simple hardware - and plenty of Free To Air (FTA) programming.