As you should know by now, on Feb 17th 2009, they are turning off the Analog television broadcasts and switching to all digital.

This will immediately render useless any portable radios that pick up TV band audio, as well as any portable televisions.

There are very few choices for portable digital televisions, there's a big ugly Coby which tends to the garbage quality and the Haier which is equally crap.

Best Buy and Radio Shack have portable models, both about $200.

But it's definitely time now to look into your storm communications kit and plan ahead.

Are there any radios available which will pick up the new TV bands?

Can current tv-receiving radios pick up the sound or will the sound be digital as well?

I'm not really worried as I'll still be able to get information through Am/Fm/Shortwave and I've got a reasonably small 19" LCD tv with an ATSC tuner that I can run off my car or generator if need be, so I think I'll be fine.

Unfortunately audio is digital too...

I wonder, will high end scanners pick anything up???

I guess I don't see the need for an emergency TV. Info on the TV is what's been disseminated and often dumbed down into uselessness. During a tornado warning warning the first thing I do is make sure the scanner is on and I monitor the local spotters and police - go to the source for the accurate info. It's amazing how often that info is at odds with what the TV (or commercial radio) is spewing out. I sure as hell wouldn't trust it for something man made like a chemical spill.
Though I suppose that really only works if they are in the area. If you're out in the middle of nowhere where there aren't police sitting around talking... but even then the automated NOAA is as good a source or better.

You beat me to it, I've found the same, it takes several minutes to get from scanner to tv and then its live so the person on tv tends to make a lot of mistakes. I always wonder where they hire those people from.

Here is one(two?) solution to portable digital t.v. (If you have a portable t.v.). I suppose you could make it work with a portable radio, but it seems like it would be a bulky result.

http://www.winegarddirect.com/cview.asp?c=Digital%20Converter%20Boxes

I never understood why a portable tv was such a big deal. I think shortwave radio or a transistor would be a much better and widely available means of gathering information. Not to forget the emergency weather channels on most 'camping' radios.

If the tv is also suppose to be for entertainment then it will be much easier to watch dvds on dvd player (et al). Batteries can be recharged with a solar panel in the case of no electricity or no surplus.

Everybodys preparedness plan is different so if a tv is your bag, let us know what you find out when everything goes digital.

I found my little portable tv to be very useful during tropical storm Allison and Hurricane Ike after the power went out. The radio gives information, but the maps they were showing on TV were much more useful.

-Blast

I too find TV to have its uses....our local stations do a good job with the broadcasts during storms (H-canes). I don't know if they do it elsewhere but a few of our stations join forces and broadcast together using the best of all of them....it is nice.

I bought a little B&W portable TV some years ago for about $30. In that time, I have used it during emergencies about twice. I guess I've substituted NOAA radio (and the local AM/FM stations) for that purpose. It doesn't help that I'd need to rig a large antenna to pick up the closest TV stations. I will probably go out and pick up a digital TV in a few years when they are common and the price is down a bit. But for now, I have 8-10 NOAA radios that have that angle covered. As a bonus, most of those are solar/hand-crank, while the TV requires a 12V hookup or a metric ton of "C" batteries.

Digital television audio in an emergency- phooey!
An actually TV- double phooey!


I'll keep my little Grundig. Shortwave might give me much usable information, but if I can get high enough at night it will pick up AM from Boston sometimes.

I looked into the ATSC system and they use power-hungry chips, not optimized for portable use.

I think there's a very good reason to have a TV on in a weather emergency - information density. When you have a tv you have audio and multiple visual streams of information. This can provide you with a lot more decision support than just an NOAA radio.

I have a battery operated, small screen portable TV (2-3 inches) that I will miss when they throw the switch to digital. One reason that I like to have a TV is for information redundancy. For whatever reason, I might be in a situation where I can pick up only a local TV station. In such a situation, a small, battery operated TV might provide the local information that I need to make prudent decisions. I'm not very happy that my portable TV's will soon become useless.

Touche.
OK, then I'll begin implementing a plan that will let me use my laptop + router + cable modem on UPS backup, with cell network as a backup ISP in case cable is out. This will give me a much larger datastream than TV, while utilizing resources I already possess. I can even post to ETS in the middle of the disaster.

Except that its so delayed from the NOAA its only useful if your not in the area of the emergency.

Basically, that's the setup I have. My "TV" is a Pinnacle USB HDTV tuner hooked to a Macbook Pro.
Data connectivity is DSL fallback is 3G, fallback is dialup, fallback is smoke signals.

You want a "command center" you can't do much better than a computer with 2 or 3 big screens and a TV tuner card or dongle.
Just power-hungry.

Bingo! I was just about to jump on the www aspect. Because I am such a paranoid about weather, while I was in Florida, my goto source of info was always the laptop. I could bring up a whole host of tv station websites as well as NOAA and others and get the latest stream of data, much sooner than NOAA weather radio, and especially the TV set. I could watch the progress of cells moving in from the southwest and get a good idea of intensity, course and speed, and whether it was building up or running down. Even running around with just a blackberry, I could access the internet with it and check the weather, including local radar, although it was admittedly not as elaborate, but it did what I needed it to do. On the rare occasions where I lost power or the cable signal went down, I could at least get to the blackberry and see what was coming.

Now I have a wi-max feed to the house here in Denver. I think it may be a step up from the cable internet service, and certainly far better than phone DSL. Nothing is foolproof, but at least when the power goes out I still have at least two hours of life in the laptop batteries, or 24+ hours on the blackberry.

Combine that with a decent trunking scanner, and you probably have as it good as it gets for monitoring weather and/or other emergency situations.

Power is indeed the problem, so is some form of portability when required i.e. a bug out situation.



My alternative 'Command Centre' setup

Viewing DVB Digital TV/Radio/Teletext broadcast reception (Laura DVB reciever)

Recording and playback of DVB broadcasts (Archos 605)

Watching DVD quality video (recoded to DivX) and Audio formats stored on SDHC cards using the Archos.

The ability to view and read any PDF file stored on the SDHC cards using the Archos.

The ability to take VGA quality Video and high resolution photos (Casio Exlim) and watch the captured content on a high reolution screen on the (Archos 605)

GSM 2.5 connectivity (Voice calls, SMS, picture SMS, email etc) using the Motorola.

The weakest link so far is Internet connectivity (current setup works quite nicely with VOIP cable broadband wireless router at home). I'm currently looking into 3G connection i.e. a 3G phone with an inbuilt wireless router (not yet available) to replace the current Motorola mobile phone. This would give the ability to access hundred of IPTV, IP Radio, Podcasts sources etc from around the world and full internet access ability.

I'm also currently looking for a high capacity general purpose Lithium Ion portable rechargeable battery with both 12V and USB input/output connectivity with individual cells based on either 18650 or RCR123 so as to be compatible with general purpose flashlights.

The SW radio reciever is not shown but is off course included. Everything should fit into a large SLR type camera bag including the Solar Power sources and associated cabling.

The Archos 605 can also be used as a Vehicle GPS navigator with the Archos GPS attachment.

And if all else fails then a portable Satellite TV reciever system may be required.

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=48737&DOY=12m11

I think that you hurricane folks make a good point as to location having an impact on what is useful and what is not. TV and other broadcasts media is useless in my area where tornados can and do form within minutes in the middle of a storm. If you have ever had 2 or 3 or more tornados wonder around your town, perhaps forming and disolving multiple times, you realize that by the time the information gets handed down to broadcast it is old and useless - perhaps making it dangerous even. That's when you need to get the raw data and analyze it yourself.
If you're talking about a huricane that you can track for days... that's alot different.
How reliable is your cell connection in the middle of a hurricane?

Sure, I'm not saying that it's completely useless - it gets the warning out and that's often all that's required to save lives. Our broadcasters stay on the air for the duration, but they mostly just repeat the fact that there's a tornado, seek shelter. If you want to know if it's on the west side of town, or the east side of town, or if there's one forming south of you going north, then it's time to break out the scanner and listen to the spotter network. By the time the broadcasters get wind of what's happening you could be gone. 5 minutes is a long time.
I guess I'm talking about getting breaking updates as opposed to information that may be too old to matter much. Now, if you've already taken shelter when the sirens were first sounded then it really wouldn't matter too much. But I prefer to know more than "there's a tornado in the area, you could be affected." If you take your portable TV in the hole with you, you're still really only going to know that "there's a tornado in the area, you could be affected." And that's great if that's all you want. I want to know about which field the tornado is in, them funny looking clouds that just started rotating, that other tornado that is on the north side of town but going north, etc.
Then again I could just be paranoid about tornados after 1980 when half the city was leveled.

I think this would be especially true in a man made disaster such as chemical leaks and such. That seems like such a fluid situation that you would not want to wait for information updates. If you are evacuating, doubly so.

So feel free to take your portable TV because there's certainly no harm in doing so, but augment your assessment capability with a good quality portable scanner.

I dunno, while I was in Central Florida it seemed there was never enough timely and accurate info coming out of the local tv stations. About the time NOAA weather radio was tripping to alert, you'd see the update on the TV, which was usually when the storm was already on top of you. When TS Olga went across the state last Christmas, it was moving too fast for even NOAA radio alerts to keep up, and when it got to Seminole/Volusia County lines, it dropped a funnel with almost no warning, and the only way I knew where and when was the laptop connection. I had been up that morning early and was tracking it from across the state on the TV, but when it turned due west from Eustis, I fired up the laptop and kept a closer eye on it. Fortunately it was on the other side of town from us when the funnel came down, but if we had been in the path, only the laptop feed would've given me any warning, short of hearing the train coming down the tracks so to speak. Other times it seemed like we were getting the flash/bang of an approaching cell, then the TV would send a new, general area warning out, whereas I could keep track of the particular cell on the laptop right up to it encroaching in our neighborhood. You won't get the weatherman's commentary with such near real time feed, but the graphics are usually enough to make your own conclusions, especially after you've been through a few.

TV is better than nothing I reckon, but for watching as close to real time as possible, nothing beats the laptop/blackberry setup short of dedicated feed. There's so much information out there to collect on the net that usually I checked the TV for confirmation of what I already knew.

It also seemed like when Fay came through and dropped a couple small funnels there in Brevard County that the TV was playing catch-up with telling people the tornado was upon them. Of course, in all them trailer courts, all you can do is try and run anways.

Barring power and/or service outages, my home is like comm central when bad weather is impending. I usually fire up the TV, portable police radio, weather radio, AM/FM/shortwave radio receiver and internet, collectively pumping info as fast as I can digest it (that's if I'm off-duty and not one of the storm spotters/chasers). It's exhilarating and scary, even for one who moves toward gun fire instead of away from it.

Yep, unless you are pretty much looking at it at the time it forms, you won't know until it's darned near on you. About the best you can do is watch the cells and convergent zones on radar and try and assess the risk. I get a kick outta watching these "Storm Chasers". What fool would drive into a cell at night knowing it is likely to produce a twister somewhere near you? Even these guys with their own portable doppler systems can't always make out the telltale pattern until they get a visual confirmation anyways. The best you get is the ability to predict when the conditions are good for one to form, but that is often just hit and miss, and not much better than when Uncle Jimmy would stick his head out the back door and look at the sky.

Hate to admit it, but I'm a visual person. Having the maps on the screen allows me to better understand where the storms are firing up.

DFW TV stations have spent a ton of money upgrading their radar systems and coming up with timely updates.

Additionally, there are so many counties in North Texas that I keep a set of maps next to the weather radio. I never can remember the locations and names of all of the nearby counties.

Unfortunately, the bottom line is that I won't be able to afford the new digital portable TVs. Guess I'll be relying upon AM radio and my paper maps.

Everyone complains about this, but the coverage in my area, Eastern Nebraska, has been excellent. NOAA radio is great here. Where do you live?

I was saying the TV coverage is delayed from the NOAA radio. The NOAA is great, the tv people delay it then think about it then have a meeting to decide if they want to broadcast it, etc.

Cool setup! Can't find the Laura online. Can you help?

Ahh. That doesn't happen here. Constant coverage for a thunderstorm. Its gotten a little stupid.

Yep, last year the tornado touched down, then the NOAA weather radio went off. Not much they can do about that I suppose. They were at a Tornado watch with the cell still 15 miles out, but as it adjusted course from NE to ENE, it condensed just as it crossed the main highway and the tornado dropped right into the middle of the population zone between Debary and Lake Mary in Seminole and Volusia Counties. The big problem was the speed of the storm as it passed over. It was moving at about 45 mph when the tornado dropped, and NOAA was having a tough go just keeping the alerts out ahead of the cell in time, and with the course change and the erratic development, it made the alert system somewhat dysfunctional.

Florida was a different beast from most of what I experienced in west Texas. There, you could see the cells coming from a distance, and you weren't surrounded by jungle obstructing your view beyond 100 feet to 100 yards out. The storms also didn't tend to move in so quick out there.

Hi Alex,

I'm affraid the Laura L36 DVB-T won't work with the ATSC broadcast standard as the DVB-T standard is a European one.


Different Standards around the world.

The Laura portable TV works quite well.

Laura DVB-T in operation (8.76 Mbytes video)

The Archos is pretty good and will allow hundreds of IPTV channels from all around the world. Of course access to IP services via DSL or wireless 3G would be required in an emergency

Archos WebTV in operation (8.65 Mbytes video) - IPTV - Just in case you want to know whats happening in Cuba, Iran or California etc.

Archos Web Access in operation (3.39 Mbytes video) - Interweb Communications.

Archos DVD video in operation (3.39 Mbytes video) - useful for entertainment purposes.

Archos InterWeb Radio in operation (3.39 Mbytes video) - Hundreds of world wide radio Stations

Actually if I was thinking about putting together a similar setup I would now probably go for the Archos 5G model. This has wireless 3.5G HSDPA data access and even has attachments to turn the Archos 5G into Sat Nav and Digital TV devices.



I would then power the device with something like a PowerGorilla and SolarGorilla combo.

https://powertraveller.com/iwantsome/primatepower/powergorilla/

Yes, constamt coverage here too, but they are very delayed. The tv may have pictures of the weather but you go to the noaa web site and its ahead of the one on the tv. Or listed to the scanner and your hearing the same story that the people on tv are hearing but your hearing it right away where they are going to hear it then take it to the control center say whatever is going on now needs interrupted and then somene hunts down the recording, finds it, they interrupt the weather guy playing with zooming in and out of the picture then tell you what happened.

One local TV station also broadcasts their audio in FM.

The lower end of the FM band overlaps certain TV stations Audio programming. That will be gone after the 19th.

I tailgated the Cardinal-Rams NFL game this weekend. About a dozen people in the area I was in, had their TV satellite dishes running off generators which were also running flat screens to watch other NFL games. One guy had five t.v.'s going at the same time.

I think if anyone is using satellite for their home viewing,it would be easy to find a forum to learn this set up. If someone can cart all this from their house to party in a stadium parking lot, it must be easy enough to set up at home in a power outage due to nature disaster.

Its not the perfect fix like say an affordable, portable digital t.v. but its a great workaround for information.

This question about "decent" quality Portable DTVs has been asked on several of the AV/Home Theatre forums and I know for a fact it's been kicked around inside the industry. Samsung and a few others have just released and/or are releasing smaller (and cheaper) chip sets so more products will appear. In the meantime I believe there are two choices....

1) A low quality unit like Insignia or other things out of China. Here are two with battery pack and charger options:
7" and 8" Portable DTVs


2) Think differently and step "around" the issues of hungry ATSC chips sets, cliff-effect reception, low quality manufacturers. Check this out:
Truly Portable DirecTV

This thing is self-contained with antenae, battery pack and 17" screen. Yes you must subscribe and it's expesive, but maybe the coolest solution out there!

Hope this helps,

Digital TV article

I've been wondering the same thing...

From the article:
"...why is the government so anxious to help American citizens experience a clearer and more highly defined television picture? Does that make sense to you? Since when is the government so concerned about the visual quality of our televised entertainment that Congress would pass an undebated statutory proclamation which mandated that the HD conversion take place on Feb. 17, 2009 and then subsidze about 90% of the associated cost?

I'm only guessing, but if there are 200 million "regular" televisions in America to be converted into HD, then that $40 in government subsidy per TV ¥ 200,000,000 = $8 billion. Why is the government so anxious to spend 8 billion dollars on her citizens to improve the clarity of a TV picture? Or is the recently touted "additional bandwidth" cover story that supposedly is to be gained with the HD technology the only and genuine reason for spending so much taxpayer dollars on HD conversion?"

Well, they will recover quite a bit of bandwidth with the change, and in a critical part of the spectrum to boot. But I suspect that there was a bit of lobbying that went on as well.

Going to HD will allow for greater regulation of the signals in the long run. The government always favors more control.

Well, I'm no engineer. But when cell phones went from analog to digital it not only freed up a lot of bandwidth (more calls can fit in less frequency) but also decreased the power needed to transmit.

If that is analogous to television's conversion, they get a key piece of their spectrum back, the reception footprint may actually grow, and they don't need to give as much bandwidth out (or they can at least fit more content into the same amount).

In any case, it can be argued that the cost is justified since the FCC (AKA the government, AKA us) gets a lot back in return. It's not just a gimmick to sell TVs and set-top converters (although it's probably that too).

Well, the article cited is in the special category of tin-foil hats that makes for a fun read. A bit more critical thinking and logic shows that it is about the money, not the "mind control" - and it's big money we're talking about

In short -
The 700 Mhz auction netted the US Government - that's you and me, don't ever forget that - $18,957,582,150 ( link ) was the net from the auction, so less the claimed 2 Billion dollars, that's 16 Billion clear for our government, almost enough to pay Citibank's golf club bills for a year.


OK, so the government get 16 Billion.

But the current license holders just got a LOT more space to sell ads. Like 4 times the space. In the short run, this will depress earnings as a mass of ad inventory supply dumps onto the market and lowers ad placement costs. But in the long run, the hope is that there will be more programming over the air.

That's a lot of jobs and such in the ad industry.

Now, let's leave out that this is strictly related to Over the Air broadcasts (OTA), which only are used by 18% of the US population (the rest seem to want to pay to see commercials, how about that?).

Yes, there's the massive, massive replacement TV market, and there's the whole be nice to our Chinese buddies who supply all the crap we "need" as well as a lot of the stuff we actually need to live the lifestyle we expect as Americans. So, all in all, I see the sense of it all - monetize the airwaves, what a concept.