RCA DTA800 Digital to Analog TV Converter Box

I bought two of these. One failed, bought another and that failed, too. When they work, they actually work pretty well and are easy to use. Nice picture, too. But because they seem to fail so readily don't be surprised if yours goes bad. And they are pain to exchange if you buy them with the vouchers. One Walmart insisted on keeping my voucher when I bought one; another Walmart insisted that I should have kept my voucher in order to exchange the dead box. What a hassle. Good luck.

I've had this unit for about one month, having purchased it at Walmart with the $40 voucher. When the signal strength is good, the unit performs fairly well and the picture is very nice. It was a huge improvement over the standard analog reception. Unfortunately, everyday use can be quite frustrating. The remote feels cheap and is missing a previous channel button. This may be the only video device I've ever encountered that lacks this feature. Amazing. Next, this converter can only auto-scan for channels. You can't add channels manually to the stored channel list, nor can you tune into a weak signal for a channel that is not in the stored channel list. They provide a signal strength bar graph and variable pitch tone feature that helps you reorient the antenna for weak signals, but you can't even tune into the weak channel to start with to use this feature. I guess you're supposed to take the converter to some hilltop and run the auto-scan. This will (hopefully) find all the channels and then you can try to use the signal strength meter when you get home. I have a 110 volt converter in my car, so I may actually try this.

You do need a suitable antenna, or this will not work. It appears a UHF antenna will do the job, but you may need a signal amplifier in the antenna, depending on where you live.

We have another converter box with features easily accessible on the remote that have to be found inside a couple of layers of menu with this unit. Still, it functions well. The buttons on the remote are not always as responsive as I would like.

I bought this unit at Wal-Mart two weeks ago. Set-up is easy and on the whole this is far more versatile than the Magnavox. Reception is excellent. HOWEVER....it's started acting up just in the last couple of days by sometimes spontaneously shutting down even with the Automatic Power Down feature set to "OFF". I e-mailed RCA's customer service detailing the problem but have received no reply. Maybe this unit is just going through a phase. I will say that it's satisfactory in all other respects. My advice is to check with other people who have bought the same unit to see if they've had any problems before purchasing your own.

This is a post-script: As of 06/02/2008 RCA has NOT responded to any of my e-mails (via their website) addressing the problem mentioned above.

Amazon is great, but this box is at Wal*Mart for $50, so if you have your $40 government subsidy card, it's only $10. I only bought it "for the future" because of the limited time subsidy, because I knew the TV reception in my little corner of the Bay Area is *terrible* with most of the broadcasters 50 miles away in San Francisco. I bought an expensive off-air HD receiver last year and ended up returning it because it only picked up 3 stations - all weird ones. I tried this RCA box using the same $25 Radio Shack antenna (when I had the expensive unit, the antenna was mounted on the roof - in testing the RCA unit, I just had it hanging out the window, with a big tree blocking it) This little baby picked up 37 channels!!! And only 2 seemed to have signals too weak to watch.
Unfortunately, I can't cancel the satellite service because this unit does NOT output HD signals, RF and baseband only. If it put out HD it would be deal of the century.