They were hoping to divert a bunch of the dollars from the spectrum
sales to other purposes - so they deliberately underfunded the coupons.
Congress and the FCC have known for at least 6 months but did nothing.
Notices about the need to get coupons to be prepared for the switch to
DTV were buried under all of the ego-maniacal politicking and rational
decisions to address the coupon shortfall were ignored in the rush to
posture for reelection.
Delaying things will create a huge mess that this Congress could have
prevented had they done their job previously ... and we rewarded them
with reelection? Duh.
Meanwhile given all of the new mess of power levels up and down, tower
work delayed, and frequency allocation transition confused I may just go
with a new cable TV promotion of $9./mo for a year and then see where
things are.
This new administration is so confused, and along with Congress so
hyper-partisan, one has little reason to expect that things will be
resolved
by June either.
> The crawler on one of the local Saturday morning news programs out of
> Syracuse this morning says Congress has reached agreement on
> extending the switchover date from February 17th to June 12th. So
> the delay is one step closer to becoming law. However, many stations
> will not be able to delay their switchover (existing facilities
> leases may be terminating) or they may not wish to (many will see
> substantial reduction in utility bills after they switch to Digital).
> As I understand the rationale for the implementation delay, however,
> it was because the government coupons had expired and/or all the
> money Congress allocated to subsidizing the converters had been used
> up before everyone who wanted one got a converter or two. That is,
> the delay has nothing to do with technical or digital coverage
> issues.
>
> Bud, W2RU
--
Thanks! & 73, doc, KD4E
FS/Swap/Wanted: http://kd4e.com/swapn.html
Free OS : http://www.PuppyLinux.com
Personal: http://kd4e.com
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Have an http://ultrafidian.com day!
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