Scores of Americans who live outside of metropolitan areas lost some good friends in June. And they weren’t Michael Jackson, Billy Mays, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon.

The companions who disappeared on June 12 ranged from Wheel of Fortune’s Vanna White and Pat Zajac to Providence, R.I., television weatherman R.J. Heim.

They were the personalities on channels 2 through 13 and, for homes not served by cable TV, they disappeared permanently when VHF stations turned off their old transmitters and began sending out a less powerful digital signal on the UHF band.

It wasn’t until this week that I got to experience first-hand the impact of the federal government DTV decision requiring television stations to abandon the channels on which they have been broadcasting since the 1950s. I was shocked at how even tech-savvy homeowners could not coax the new digital signals into their TV sets.

The “South County” region of Rhode Island is not rural America, by many standards.  Located just 35 miles south of Providence, the county has numerous year-round communities — like Wakefield and Narragansett  — as well as summer vacation havens for beachgoers.  At the local Radio Shack outlet, a sales associate admitted that more than half the digital television antennas sold were being returned because it was impossible to receive the ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates that had previously supplied area residents
with news, weather, sports and entertainment.

I had planned ahead for our summer sojourn by buying a $59 device to convert digital broadcasts into an analog signal that our cottage’s 1980s-era TV set could display.  When the box did not find any signals powerful enough, I bought a $35 amplified digital antenna. That maneuver succeeded in locating four undesirable channels run by the bankrupt media organization formerly known as Paxson, perhaps best known for its religious and home-shopping networks.  Still no luck finding the mainstay Providence stations.

Failure of the recommended consumer solutions meant taking this technical challenge into the capable hands of several neighborhood macho men, all well-versed in building and repairing electronics.

We attached to a mast a commercial-grade UHF antenna that looked like some sort of Cold War military apparatus and hoisted it above the rafters of our beach cottage.  Then we employed a smart phone application that provides a digital compass so we could aim the antenna directly at the television transmission towers we were targeting, using http://antennaweb.org to get the precise coordinates.

After we wasted several quality vacation hours that should have been used consuming beers and absorbing UV rays on the beach, we determined that Narragansett, Rhode Island, population 16,361 at the 2000 census, is a television black hole for those without subscriptions to cable or satellite services.

If it’s this bad in New England, I can only imagine how challenging it will be to serve off-the-grid citizens in the rural South, Great Plains and other regions.  Suddenly, it seems likely that media bad boy Michael Wolff was correct in April when he predicted that the big three TV networks would soon have audiences no larger than a mid-sized metro daily newspaper.

Embracing new media technologies has been a defining characteristic of my professional life.  Yet I find it distasteful when government and industry turn their back on consumers who made older media successful.  Forced upgrades are fine, as long as they work just as well as legacy systems and the financial investment in modernizing is not too steep.

This digital TV conversion was characterized as an upgrade when it actually leaves millions of formerly loyal viewers, outside the regions served by insufficient UHF signals, with a choice of a monthly cable or satellite bill or no service at all.