It’s been one month since my transition to digital terrestrial television after the switch off in my region. Initially I did a new channels automatic scan and store almost every day to check if there were new ones and if some of them changed number. After some days I started doing it only once a week because I noticed that at that point the problems I initially had with some national channels had disappeared and sometimes no new channels appeared.

Now I have more than 200 digital channels: even considering that many are pay TVs and some channels are on more than one frequency I still have more than 100 channels available. With analog TV I used to have about 30 channels and for some of them the images weren’t perfect.

Here in Gorizia the digital signal is good, in some other zones it seems still weak and when there’s bad weather it can disappear. This situation is just part of the national one with zones where there are already various channel that broadcast in HD and others where there are still coverage issues.

[ad name=”Google Adsense 468″]

That uncle of mine I helped the day of the switch off still had some issues with some national channels but the reason was very silly: the antenna jack wasn’t perfectly plugged into its wall socket. The system is old but it always worked, unfortunately one of the problems with the digital terrestrial TV is that you don’t realize if a channel signal is weak while with analog channel you could see it because of the “snow effect” in the image. Basically a digital channel is generally seen perfectly or not at all so if any issue in the system weakens the signal under the minimum level you need to see it you simply can’t get the image anymore.

Maybe I was lucky because here in Gorizia the digital signal is good but as I explained the last month I was adequately prepared. Eventually the greatest annoyance of this transition is caused by the fact that channels still broadcast in different formats and sometimes the same channels broadcast different programmes in different formats. As a consequence if I want to avoid watching them deformed I need to manually select the 4:3 or 16:9 format.

I really hope that when all Italy switches to digital terrestrial TV the broadcasters will adopt the 16:9 format for all their programmes.

Could the transition be handled better? Of course. Among the people who complain there are some who ingnored the switch off until the last moment, someone even claim they knew nothing about it even if local media widely announced the switch off day. For someone there are objective problems but honestly someone else created their own problems.