Mitch, The best way to solve this problem is to get one of the digital converter boxes available via the government cupons and from Radio shlock, Best buy and other sources. These have two ways of getting audio and video out of them: 1. An R.F. connector like for T.V. cable.This can be set to produce either chanel 3 or 4 analog signals.
2. three RCA phono plugs, audio (line out) left and right plus video. Simplest thing to do is hook the audio line out jacks into some amplifier as in a stereo with aux inputs. This won't be battery powered and you'll need a T.V. antenna of some kind depending on your signal strength and distance from transmitters. Now these boxes are only somewhat usefull to a bat. Thanks FCC and capitalistic industry who doesn't care. When set up, you need sighted help to make them scan local signals and memorize them. Then you can usually manage to use the remote that comes with the converter box to select chanels. As each numbered chanel may have several sub chanels associated with it, means of selecting these sub chanels vary from converter to converter. >From what I've seen and heard there is no particular converter box that is better for us than any other. At least, if you can get the government cupons still, it will be pretty cheap to get a converter, and presumably you have a convenient stereo or similar with line inputs for the audio. It is possible you could run the converter's R.F. output to some gimmicked up link to the antenna of your T.V. band radio, but that's the hard way and unless you just don't have an amplifier around, i wouldn't bother. Best we can do for now, again thanks to the ever vigilant FCC. who does exactly what industry wants, not what is good for "us"! Hope that helps, ask if you want more clarification. There was a basic review of converter boxes in AFB's Access world a few isues back. Luck Tom Fowle Embedded Systems Developer/ Rehab engineer Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute 2318 Fillmore St. San Francisco, CA 94115 415-345-2123 (Voice) fo...@ski.org
