DTV transition "Soft test" on 11-20-08 in Chicago

[ChrisW6ATV]

Unfortunately, despite all of the TV stations and extra digital channels here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we do not have Retro TV. It sounds like a good channel, kind of like TV Land (is or was; I have not had pay satellite TV for nearly three years) but for free?

We do not get thunderstorms here, so I do not know how my digital reception might be affected, but I do have a question: It seems that the people most at risk in severe weather (I am thinking of tornadoes in particular) are those most likely to be in rural/outlying/spread-out areas, who therefore probably also need large and/or tall TV antenna installations if they do not have cable TV (unless they have satellite TV, the limitations of which are a whole other, unrelated, subject). Those tall antennas in spread-out areas are also the most likely to attract lightning strikes, I am sure. If I remember from my days living in the Midwest, wasn't it safest to always disconnect any outdoor antenna cables from your equipment during storms to protect it? How are people then trying to watch TV under such conditions? (Are they tuning in weak, snowy pictures on rabbit-ear-type antennas?) To keep watching a TV connected to a large outdoor antenna during an electrical storm, with a lightning-arrestor system or not, seems very dangerous (to the viewer(s) as well as to any connected equipment).