Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years and 2 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

So the original February 17th deadline for the digital TV switchover has come and gone but only a handful of stations have shut off their analog signals thanks to the DTV Delay Act. Is everyone confused yet?

One thing I don’t think a lot of people here in hurricane country have thought of (even myself, until recently) is those battery powered TVs in their hurricane kits. I have a little 5″ B&W television in our supply kit that runs on 6 D-cell batteries … and it won’t work after the digital switchover in June without a converter box. The problem is: how do you power a converter box when you don’t have power?

One solution is a battery-powered converter box like the Winegard RCDT09A (which is also coupon eligible). Another possibility (and I have to give my local Fox news team credit for this one … can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself) is a USB TV tuner for your laptop.

I just happened to have the Happauge WinTV-HVR-950Q sitting in my computer parts box, unused. Since I have a bunch of TiVos in the house, I didn’t really need a TV tuner for my PC so I threw it in there several months ago and forgot about it. It makes sense, though, to put this little device in our hurricane kit.

I first tried to get the device working with my Eee PC. Ubuntu recognized the hardware right away (and it showed up in Totem, the media player), but I could not get w_scan to find any channels with neither the included antenna nor with the tuner directly connected to cable. I tried all sorts of other packages (xawtv, mythtv, dvb-utils, etc.) and just could not get it to work at all.

So I moved on to Windows Media Center on our Vista laptop and it worked perfectly. While the signal strength is poor in my area (we’re about 33 miles away from all the main antennas according to antennaweb.org), I can at least pick up the local ABC and (barely) CBS affiliates which is all we really need during a storm.