First things first; I’m glad that the storms missed us. As for those that are complaining about the hype; take a look at central Wisconsin this morning. These storms typically are not extremely widespread, and we in southeast Wisconsin were at the extreme east edge of the second PDS tornado watch. Dunno if we had a violent tornado in that particular watch box (there was a 50% chance of one), but we definitely had more than 2 tornadoes in central/northeast Wisconsin.
One more thing; Tim Cuprisin is both right and wrong about the drop of HD programming. Yes, the local stations don’t have the ability to put up their fancy watch/warning graphics with HD programming, and yes, the FCC does require them to broadcast the watch/warning info, but the FCC does not, repeat NOT require them to have either the constant reminder or the fancy graphics. Dunno about last night (had some cable to watch), but in the past, Channels 18 and 24 sufficed with the occassional crawl reminder, and if there were any warnings in their assigned broadcast areas, they broke in with both the crawl and the NWS radio feed. Dunno whether channel 36 (the half of the local welfare TV duo that broadcasts in HD) managed to put its simple warning graphic into the HD feed (not only do I not watch welfare TV, but their digital signal doesn’t like my location).
4/6/12/58 (and the weak-sister 41, which piggybacks onto 58’s digital signal and thus never goes into HD) have been broadcasting in HD for several years. In just over a year and a half, they won’t be broadcasting analog anymore. So, when the hell are they going to pony up for the HD version of their useless fancy-schmanzy weather graphics, or even better, dump them onto a subchannel? After all, Channel 4 (which for reasons beyond my reckoning doesn’t send out the code required to display as Channel 4/4.1 versus RF 28/28.1) carries the NBC weather channel on its subchannel. 6 and 12 don’t use their subchannels at all (though it could be because they broadcast in 720p). Even 58 has room to put weather on a second subchannel before losing the ability to broadcast in HD.
