In Van Nuys, I get about 60 digital TV channels over the air

Before I got a digital TV set or DTV converter box for one of my old ones, I was worried that I'd have trouble receiving high-definition digital signals from the local TV stations.

I say this because at my Van Nuys, Calif., home, we use rabbit ears — not even an outside antenna — and get quite a few analog channels pretty well, and a few critical ones pretty poorly.

The "analog" problem is with the lower VHF channels — 2, 4 and 5. It's hard to get one good without the others looking like hell. And that's when I look for a compromise in how I configure my two sets of rabbit ears so I can at least get 2 and 4 acceptably.

I was worried about digital TV, an unknown quantity in my house. Would I get any channels? I knew that digital signals are generallly an "all or nothing" proposition: They come in with total clarity, or not at all.

Once I had all the cables plugged into our new Vizio 22-inch LCD set (old-school VCR and DVD player), I turned the set on.

The Vizio started automatically scanning for signals. It got all of the analog stations I'm accustomed to receiving plus about 60 digital channels. Many if not most of the broadcast stations "split" their digital signals into between two and eight separate channels (how Channel 18 gets so many channels in there, I don't know).

Once the Vizio finished its scan, I ended up with perfect reception of every local station's digital signal but one, Channel 13.

I suppose I could tweak my rabbit ears a bit to get Channel 13 to come in via digital, and I probably will, but I'm not a big viewer of that station, and I'm honest-to-god impressed with my ability to get five dozen channels in digital with nothing more than a $5 pair of VHF rabbit ears on top of a cabinet (and remember that all HDTV signals are UHF).

I spent the princely sum of $12 on a Philips passive HDTV rabbit-ears antenna, but it looks like I won't need it.

As in all things that have to do with over-the-air reception, your mileage may vary, but if you have good reception of analog TV over the air, chances are good that you'll have good digital reception, too.

And in my case, the nature of digital reception means I have all but a single station with PERFECT reception — a far cry from what I get in analog.