False Positive Results Likely in Wilmington

[Commentary] On September 8th television stations in Wilmington (NC) will be turning off their old analog signals and going all digital. For such a test to be truly useful it needs to take place in as typical an environment as possible, but in a whole host of ways the Wilmington experiment will be anything but typical. Wilmington has been awash of late with people interested in making sure the area's transition comes off as successfully as possible. No other community in the country is going to receive anywhere close to the kind of government attention and resources now being thrown at Wilmington. Because of that, the valuable lessons the Wilmington experiment might otherwise have been expected to provide will likely be rendered useless to the thousand of other communities facing the DTV transition next February. Additionally, the Wilmington area is tightly packed and basically flat. That means TV signals don't have to travel over very long distances and are not subject to the reception problems caused in other areas by mountains, hills, valleys or even tall buildings. There's also just a small percentage of the Wilmington-area residents relying on over-the-air broadcasting. Expect the FCC, the broadcast industry and others with vested interests in drawing a positive picture of the Wilmington experiment to do just that following the September 8 cutover. Unfortunately, the most likely result of the Wilmington test will be a false positive.