DTV switcheroo: 11 o'clock and all's well....

There's the Fox 4 test pattern, as promised, the last thing viewers of WDAF's analog signal saw this morning. More pix from 4

I just got off the phone with Bob McKinney, district director of the Federal Communications Commission in Kansas City. Along with several of his staff, the FCC has been fanning out to stations in the region to ensure the shutoff of analog TV signals (which I wrote about yesterday) is going according to plan.

If anything, it's going better than expected.

McKinney parked himself at a phone bank at KMBC, Channel 9, which didn't actually go off the air this morning as it's the city's "nightlight" station, and will be running a continuous loop on its analog signal for another 30 days telling viewers they need to switch now. Calls have been coming in steadily, but traffic really slowed down after about 10 a.m. Mostly it's folks who were needing help hooking up the converter boxes they'd bought but hadn't gotten around to installing.

I asked McKinney about acting FCC chairman Copps' steady stream of dire warnings in the months leading up to the switch. Was the concern that real, or was the commission just trying to put the fear of god into late converters?

"I think there was legitimate concern," McKinney said, "especially when the coupon program ran out of money just as people were starting to want the coupons." McKinney acknowledged, though, that there will be problems as people discover that having a converter box is like having a satellite receiver: When it rains, the picture pixellates or vanishes completely.

In related news, the computer speakers in my home office — just about a mile south of Signal Hill, where Fox 4 broadcasts — are still humming like sonsaguns, long after the WDAF analog transmitter has shut down. Oh well.