Longtime telecommunications consultant Tom Allibone recently appointed himself an “FCC Deputy,” looking out for consumers in the looming transition to digital television. We’re glad he has.

“Deputy Tom” has posted a story online about the trials and tribulations of getting his rural New Jersey home ready for the February 2009 switchover by full-power TV broadcasters from their traditional analog signals to all digital.

Allibone’s story should be required reading for the government officials at the Federal Communications Commission and the Commerce Department in charge of the switchover, which will affect millions of Americans who rely on free, over-the-air television. Ditto for electronics makers and retailers, as well as the TV broadcasting industry.

You can read the whole sordid story by clicking here.

Tom’s story begins with the arrival in the mail of his two $40 DTV converter box “coupons.” He cheerily headed off to his local Best Buy to check out his options – which turned out to be precisely one model – the Insignia NS-DXA1, which the store was selling for about $60.

The salesman knew virtually nothing about the converter box. If he had, he might have been able to tell Tom that the Insignia model he was being sold did not have a feature allowing analog signals to “pass through.” That’s important because hundreds of low-power television stations will continue to broadcast analog signals after the February 2009 switchover. Many of those stations are located in rural areas, like where Tom lives.

Without a converter box, Tom had always been able to pick up 11 channels from Philadelphia and New York. Some are little snowy, but watchable. He hooked up his new converter box and did an initial channel scan. To Tom’s surprise, the screen flashed “No Signals Found.”

We’ll let Tom take the story from here.

“Upon rechecking the connection, I found the issue and performed the auto-channel search again. This time the display found seven channels. As I moved the antenna, at one point the auto channel search found as many as 14 channels. And it was bizarre. I got a Korean channel, some local station from a small NJ town and other mixed-bag watching – all of which I didn't know existed – and would never watch.

”This is where things got very interesting. The digital converter box has a "signal strength" button that shows a color coded bar. When it is displayed on the screen, you can watch your signal bounce up and down like the wind was blowing thru your TV. It was probably one of the most useful features with the digital converter as I continued to reposition the TV and see what happened.

”Basically, my digital signal strength mostly fell into the 15% to 50% range. If I repositioned the antenna, I could receive one Philadelphia station and others would pixilate, freeze the screen, provide intermittent sound and in some cases revert to a black screen saying "no signal".

”It appeared that when a station worked well, meaning consistent picture and sound with no pixilating or sound degradation, the signal showed 75% or higher. At the 60% to 75% signal strength, the picture would experience degradation issues previously described.

”Like many rural country consumers with TV antennas in the attic, we chose to give up some of the signal power for a number of reasons. It has worked well in the analog world but the new digital signal does not appear to be as resilient. Based upon my experience, it appears that minimum signal strength of 75% is needed; otherwise, reception begins to degrade.

”At this point in the process of converting to over the air digital, it was clear that simply buying a digital converter was not the answer. I couldn't get the basic channels I watch without pixelating, etc. Using my current system configuration with the converter does not work as well as my analog system. So, where do you go from here?”

We highly recommend you read the rest of “FCC Deputy” Tom’s story for yourself, but we’re sure he won’t mind us telling you the anything-but-happy ending.

It looks like he is facing a total bill of $650 to buy a new, high-tech antenna and get it installed so he can continue to get the same channels he now watches just fine with his old analog TVs.

He concludes with these words: “The government claims that this should go smoothly… and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars for us to drink the Kool-Aid – only to find out that it's now undrinkable purple stuff for millions of customers.”