WJWJ moves to DTV; what will be the impact?

In the "don't panic, everything is OK category", we have WJWJ in South Carolina trying to figure out the impact of switching over to a digital television transmitter. WJWJ is a PBS station in Beaufort and we give them two thumbs up for switching over to digital transmission next month, since some of the best HDTV programming is on PBS.

According to the Beaufort Gazette, the WJWJ television signal will drop to 1 percent of its current reach. We get that part, really we do; whenever you take a transmitter down, you're effectively going to provide a signal between zero and none.

It's the impact of the signal loss that we're confounded by. The Gazette states "Exactly how that will affect the station's reception for viewers in southern Beaufort County isn't known." Uh guys, I think we can safely say reception will be non-existent. There isn't a set of rabbit-ears big enough to pull in a signal from a down transmitter. If you find a pair, drop us a note so we can do a review. Maybe we can use the antenna to help out the SETI team find signals from space.