Battery powered digital converter

One of the often overlooked aspects of the analog-to-digital TV transition is that the vast majority of portable TVs have an analog tuner and won't be able to receive signals after the big switch on February 17, Earlier this year, we wrote a blog titled, " Don't buy a portable TV this year " to warn consumers about the coming switch, plus the fact that the FCC had stated that it didn't expect any battery-powered DTV converters to be released.

Well, that prediction was a little off the mark, as we recently posted our review of the Winegard RCDT09A, which is the first battery-powered DTV converter box that we've seen. While that might be a lot of effort for a tailgate party, it's an excellent solution for those that use portable TVs for news in emergency situations where there's no power. The bottom line is that it's still probably not a good idea to buy a new analog portable TV--using a battery-powered converter box is a pretty kludgey workaround--but you may be able to extend the life of your existing portable set with the RCDT09A.

Shouldn't be too difficult to slot together eight AAs and solder on a suitable wall-wart plug. Or if battery life is more important, two 9volts would give you the needed power while making the unit much more portable. I've been thinking about portable power a lot this past week having just emerged from Hurricane Ike. And next year, the TV will be useless, so the subject of a portable digital converter box has suddenly become very important.

You can see the project on Instructables dot com, Just search for Digital Converter Hack — Kipkay , Apr 17 Shirley what is needed is not an analogue-to-digital convertor, but digital-to-analogue? Probably enough to justify skipping the cost of this converter and just going for the new tv.

The one that I linked to has about the same sized screen as my current one. So, I don't believe that battery life would be much improved. I have a portable TV which has an external antenna socket which, with adapters, may be able to accept coax cables but the TV, by itself, can't recieve digital TV signals. Balloon TV Aerial. Battery operated analog-to-digital converter box. Flame antenna. Hidden Parabolic Dish. In house preselected channels retransmitter. Remote-controlled TV antenna.

Stealth Satellite Dish. Wearable TV antenna. Battery operated analog-to-digital converter box If you have an analog-only portable TV, you can just get a portable converter box. I'm a little confused. So the problem is that you have to charge up the batteries - or that the batteries are housed in an external pouch? I was saying that the converter box should run on it's own batteries- it probably wouldn't take that many.

I don't know how many stations will continue to broadcast analog, if any, because the station may decide that the benefits of continuing to use analog are limited. It wouldn't need a station knob if it reencoded all the stations into one multi-frequency signal.

I think it would be more expensive if it had some way of being "tuned" by the TV's internal controls, even if it were just a matter of sending a regular analog signal down the line- since many portable TVs have some kind of video input, the DTV recieving device would simply need to send a video signal- all you'd have to do is set the TV to channel 3 or set it to the video input, depending on the TV.

Abs, that's an intresting idea, but I don't know how long it'd last, because the STB obviously wasn't designed with battery power in mind if it doesn't already have a way of accepting batteries, so it'd likely chew through them rather quickly —. Mild observation: Many seem to talk of using an enormous pack of 10 or more AA batteries. I recently converter an RCA digiatl box to run on batteries.

Shirley what is needed is not an analogue-to-digital convertor, but digital-to-analogue?