Are you ready for the transition to digital TV?

Survey says: Probably so.

President Obama recently signed legislation to push back the mandatory analog shut off date from tomorrow until June 12, but some stations still plan to shut down their analog signals this week. The Obama administration requested the delay, fearing too many viewers are unprepared.

In its most recent estimate released Feb. 5, the Nielsen Co. said 5.8 million U.S. households that rely on analog TV -- about 5.1 percent of homes -- are completely unprepared for the transition to digital.

But in Pittsburgh, just 29,000 homes -- about 2.56 percent of local households -- are unready, making Southwestern Pennsylvania the sixth most-prepared of the Top 56 TV markets in the country, according to Nielsen. And it's not the most vulnerable who are least prepared locally.

According to Nielsen, 3.6 percent of homes of viewers under age 35 are unprepared. About 3.11 percent of homes occupied by people in the age 35-54 demographic are unready, and just 1.73 percent of homes of seniors age 55 and over are unprepared. (Local African-American households are completely prepared, according to Nielsen estimates, and there aren't enough Hispanic households for the company to measure.)

So why are three stations -- WPGH, WPMY, WQEX -- sticking to the original Feb. 17 date to convert completely to digital broadcasting while others will wait?

• Expense: It costs TV stations thousands of dollars every month to power both analog and digital signals.

WQED Multimedia general manager Deborah Acklin said it would cost WQED an unbudgeted $50,000 to continue broadcasting WQED and WQEX in both analog and digital until June.

Initially, WQED planned to shut off the analog signals to both WQEX and WQED tomorrow, but it opted to keep WQED going in analog through March to avoid cutting off analog viewers who might contribute during the station's pledge drive next month.

• Competition: KDKA, at the direction of its owner, CBS, was the first station to say it would definitely wait until June to shut off its analog signal. With KDKA the ratings leader in most news time slots (except mornings), that could have made competitors unwilling to give up any ground, no matter how small the analog tune-in might be.

(Stations that planned to go ahead with analog shut-off had to notify the Federal Communications Commission last week. There's still a chance the FCC could deny those requests, but because so many local channels will not drop analog tomorrow, it seems unlikely that the FCC will prevent WPGH, WPMY and WQEX from ending analog broadcasts.)

One thing's for certain: Local TV stations have gone above and beyond the call of duty to prepare the public for this switch to digital TV. Stations have run crawls, aired special programs and included countdowns in newscasts. Any viewer who is unprepared has only himself or herself to blame.

Was this delay necessary? Probably not for Pittsburgh viewers, but setting the cutoff for a winter month was wrong-headed from the start, given the number of people who are going back to rooftop antennas to better receive digital signals. With four additional months until Pittsburgh's most-watched stations drop their analog signals, residents can wait out winter weather before climbing on their roofs.

Probably the biggest area of unpreparedness among local viewers applies to those TV sets in kitchens and offices and dens that are not hooked up to cable. Secondary sets are not taken into account in Nielsen's preparedness surveys. When viewers finally get around to hooking those up to a digital-to-analog converter box and discover they may no longer receive all the channels they did in the past, that's when tempers will flare.

In these final hours before Pittsburgh's "American Idol" and "24" station, WPGH, turns off its analog signal, here's a reminder of DTV essentials:

• If there is cable or satellite service connected to a TV, no action is required. You'll still receive all the local channels you get currently come tomorrow.

• If you don't have cable or satellite and get your TV signals over-the-air using an antenna, you'll need a TV set with a digital tuner or an analog-to-digital converter box. (To request a $40 coupon to buy a box, call 1-888-DTV-2009 or visit www.dtv2009.gov.) Since March 2007, all television reception devices -- TVs, VCRs -- imported into the United States have had to include a digital tuner. (Some analog TVs may have been sold by stores since then, but they were required to be marked as such.)

• If you're using rabbit ears to receive an over-the-air analog signal, that may or may not be sufficient for digital. If you have a rooftop antenna, it can be used with digital, but there's no guarantee that any antenna will pull in all the stations in digital that it did in analog. The hilly terrain of Western Pennsylvania can make it difficult to receive a signal. In addition, in some places, signal strength will vary with airplane traffic, the movement of trees in the wind and the amount of foliage on trees.

• DTV signals in this market are mostly UHF and require a UHF antenna, the bow tie or loop that attaches to the traditional VHF rabbit ears. Some newer antennas designed for the digital era look like a thin grill rack.

• The transition discussed here refers to broadcasters changing their over-the-air signals from the analog spectrum to the digital spectrum. In an unrelated move, Comcast has been moving channels to what it calls digital tiers on its cable systems, and that's confusing some TV viewers. The Comcast moves have nothing to do with the government-mandated analog-to-digital switch.

• If you have an HDTV hooked up to a cable box via an HDMI cable -- the preferred choice for the best picture and sound quality -- you can't get closed captions the way you have in the past. Captions have to be turned on through the cable box. Contact your cable company for detailed instructions on how to operate closed captions. If your HDTV gets its signal over the air and is not attached to cable/satellite, then you'll get closed captions the traditional way, through closed caption settings on the TV.

• You can still use a VCR with a digital-to-analog converter. A link to instructions for how to make the proper connections can be found at post-gazette.com/tv along with additional DTV preparedness documentation.