CANTON – Wayne Dube is ready. For 15 years Dube, Canton’s fire chief, watched television free over the air. But, with the impending switch to digital-only broadcasts, he decided to get a cable connection last month.

“I knew it was coming and I had tried a converter box, but I didn’t have any luck,” Dube said of his efforts to tune in digital signals. “When I got it hooked up, I still didn’t get the signal, and when I got into it a little bit deeper, it said I had poor reception from my antenna.”

Weighing his options, he decided his best bet was a local cable provider.

“I know I was one of the dying breeds there,” Dube said. “I know from talking to people at work, they couldn’t believe that I was still on my antenna.”

In Farmington, Holley Road resident Gloria Lincoln has been tuning in over-the-air television for 22 years using a 40-year-old, roof-mounted rotor antenna. She doesn’t watch much television and an occasional rotor twist was all it took to get most of what she wanted to watch tuned in, she said.

Unlike Dube, she has no intention of getting a cable subscription.

“I have to sacrifice for not making a payment every month,” Lincoln said.

She did invest in a new digital television and, during recent digital tests conducted by Maine news programs, her new set worked well, but an older television in her bedroom couldn’t receive the signals. The bedroom set had already stopped receiving Maine Public Broadcasting when the state’s public network made the switch to digital in January.

Lincoln hopes her old set with a converter box and her old antenna will still work. Hers was among the estimated 87,000 households in Maine receiving only over-the-air television late last year.

How many remain without a plan or even a clue that the switch is coming is unclear, said Suzanne Goucher, president and CEO of the Maine Association of Broadcasters. She suspected many of those 87,000 homes have figured it out or are at least aware of the switch.

All of Maine’s broadcast stations have been warning and advising viewers for months of the switch, originally set for Feb. 17 but pushed back to June 12 recently by Congress and President Barack Obama.

In Maine, only five of the state’s 15 broadcast stations will continue to broadcast in both digital and analog until June. The bulk will throw the switch to digital on Tuesday.

“At this point, we don’t know how many have decided to subscribe to cable or satellite,” Goucher said Friday.

‘All or nothing’

Maine’s more rural towns, especially places like Canton and Farmington – surrounded by mountains or big hills – are the kinds of places that will confound digital signals, Goucher said.

Even though the size and shape of the digital and analog broadcast areas for a given transmitter are very similar, analog signals tend to bounce and bend better, in general reaching geographic places digital signals may not reach, Goucher said.

“The caveat is digital signals are subject to what’s known as the cliff effect,” she said “With analog, you may have gotten a fuzzy or weak image and analog is forgiving as it bends around corners and mountains and hills. At the fringe or the outer reaches of a transmission area you may get a snowy and ghostly image and, if you may throw up a pair of rabbit ears, you are able to get at least some kind of reception.”

With digital, if you get the signal the image is “perfect, perfect, perfect” and if you don’t, you see a blank screen, Goucher said. “It’s an all or nothing proposition.”

Older analog televisions with a digital converter box and the right antenna should work for much of Maine for over-the-air broadcasts.

A federally funded coupon program that covers $40 of the cost for up to two televisions per home is being refunded under the economic stimulus bill wending its way through Congress, Goucher said.

But, come Tuesday, some may still be left holding their rabbit ears and wondering what happened to their favorite shows.

Public television has already made the switch to digital but on Tuesday, it will more than double its digital transmission strength from 13.2 kilowatts to 30 kilowatts. That may allow many who were unable to get MPBN after the switch to now do so, Goucher said.

She said over-the-air viewers should plan to re-program or “scan” again for digital signals on their converter boxes or digital televisions on Tuesday or Wednesday.

“If you weren’t getting it on your digital converter box before, try again,” Goucher said.

Replace, and place, antennae

Also much of what you can pull in will depend on your antenna and older VHF-only antennae will need to be replaced with VHF-UHF combination antenna.

A resident of Manchester, Goucher said she wasn’t able to pick up the digital signal from the NBC affiliate WCSH-6 until she moved her antenna 3 feet and placed it in a window sill. She said the transmission tower is 55 miles away but the image quality is crystal clear now.

Some viewers will need even more help, including roof-top antennae that can amplify the digital signal. Others may be left without television reception if they don’t hook up to either cable or satellite.

“It’s location, location,” said Dave Allen of Allen’s TV in Livermore Falls who has been receiving calls as people hook up the conversion boxes. “People in valleys or out on the edges may need to be more in-line to receive the digital signal.”

Broadcasters are transmitting on UHF rather than VHF and with less power, so some people who used to get local channels 6, 8 and 13 may only get one or two, he said. Many of those are elderly who don’t understand the new technology and don’t look forward to monthly bills for cable or satellite, Allen said.

He installed the largest antenna that he could for one elderly customer in Chesterville but his home was along a row of trees so now he can get two channels, but not the three the man really wanted, Allen said.

“There’s a large number of people who still don’t realize they have problems and aren’t aware that the digital signal is out there already,” Allen said.

Thousands without TV?

The conversion boxes can also be confusing. It’s hard for people to understand that the channel change is made in the box, not on their television which stays on Channel 3, much the way a DVD or VCR player works. Viewers may also require two remote controls rather than one, Allen said.

Leo Dyer, owner of a Radio Shack franchise in Mexico, said his store had sold a lot of converter boxes to customers wishing to retrofit their analog television sets.

But many people who have bought or are buying converter boxes rather than switching to cable or satellite will still lose reception, especially if they live in the mountains or down in a small valley ringed by hills or mountains, Dyer said.

“So, there’s going to be thousands of people without TV, I think. But, you can always listen to the radio,” he said.

Stephen Galvin, station manager at the Norway-Paris Community Television station, said he had questions about the digital conversion and didn’t believe it was very well-thought-out.

“The whole inspiration was to improve communication in case of an emergency. Public broadcasting is the starting point for emergency broadcasting,” Galvin said. “It really was kind of a farce. The original reasoning was to open up more bands for first responders after 9/11. But now the lowest income people will end up with no communication.

“I have several friends who do not have the availability of cable and can’t afford satellite so now they’ll be without TV,” he said. “It’s going to whack the poorest of the people out there.”

Others said they didn’t see the conversion as a big issue. In towns like Otisfield, which has never had cable, the problem does not appear to be overwhelming, said Administrative Assistant Marianne Izzo-Morin.

“A lot of people have digital or a dish,” she said.

Local cable providers have said they have seen an uptick in calls from existing customers but haven’t seen a great demand for new sign-ups.

George Allen, general manager of Beeline Cable TV which serves the towns of Farmington, Wilton and Industry, said the cable service has spent the past two years and about $50,000 for technology to receive the digital signals and convert them to analog so their customers could receive television just as they always have.

When analog goes off the air, it may generate business from people who were counting on their antennae.

Both those selling cable services or over-the-air equipment agreed that the government wasn’t thinking of the Northeast when it set the date of Feb. 17.

“It’s tough to change an antenna during the winter months in the north,” said George Allen.

Regional Editor Scott Thistle and Staff Writers Terry Karkos, Ann Bryant, Leslie Dixon and Eileen Adams contributed to this report.