Having DTV conversion problems?
The overwhelming majority of TV households in our five county area seem to have successfully made the switch to digital TV yesterday. There are still some viewers who’ve needed help.
There are more than 170 thousand television households in our viewing area. The numbers today indicate that somewhere around 300 or more of them might have had a problem in making the switch.
There are several help lines people can call with questions and in some cities like Wilmington, the fire department will even come out to your home to help you with your converter box.
Edie Cutler is not alone when it comes to converter box confusion. She said, “I’m pretty sure I followed directions and meshed all these little up and down buttons and put in the code for the kind of TV it is, but I just cant get it to do anything.”
After hours of trying she was unable to get either of her two TV’s working digitally. So she called the Wilmington DTV helpline.
The Wilmington fire department is actually coming out to people’s homes to help them find a solution to their converter box problems.
Not only will the Wilmington fire department help you hook up your converter box and trouble shoot for problems, they will also check your smoke detector.
Since the switch at noon, they’ve received around 100 phone calls and are tying to return everyone’s message as quickly as possible.
Andrea Good with the Wilmington fire department said, “It’s just a matter of being patient. I know everybody wants their TV and they want it working and they want it now, an unfortunately we didn’t know how many calls we were going to get.”
The majority of the problems have easy solutions, so before you call for help the fire department wants you to make sure you’re hitting the scan feature on the menu.
“People aren’t scanning, aren’t pressing their auto scan feature on their menu button, and if you don’t go ahead and do this than the stations won’t be able to be picked up,” said Good.
Also make sure your TV’s on the correct channel.
Edie’s problem was that she didn’t have the antenna hooked to the converter box. Also the TV wasn’t in a good area of the house to pick up a signal. After that discovery, the fire department was able to get the TV in the kitchen up and running.
“It’s clear, it’s beautiful and it didn’t take him very long at all,” said Cutler.
The fire department will not be able to give you a converter box or an antenna. They are only able to help you with the antenna and DTV box you already have.
Another common problem is digital signal strength. Some station’s digital signal simply isn’t as strong as its former analog signal in certain parts of our five county coverage area.
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