Mini TVs and new signal making them obsolete in 2009?

Question

The handheld tvs you can buy, is there anyway for them to modify with the digital signal we will migrate to in 2009 or are they pretty much a lost cause?

Answer 1

They are a lost cause although some have a plug in antenna jack that will take coax including that from a converter, but all the converters on the market that I have seen are AC and big.   This partly explains why the portable TV's I was glancing at today are really cheap.   Presumably there are HD or just Digital portables out there some where.

Like This

http://www.lcddigital.tv/

Answer 2

There is no way a mini TV can be internally modified to receive digital broadcasts.

If the mini TV has a way to connect either an external antenna or composite cables, then you can use them with converter box. But the size and weight of the converter & a battery pack to power it would reduce it's portability.

Some of the converters use an external DC power supply, so making them work with a battery pack would be simple.

I imagine in the next 6 months some web pages will show up showing examples of how people did this. I think it's better for someone else to figure out which model is best.

As of now there is no way to use a converter box with a mini tv that can only use it's internal antenna. I suspect that it wouldn't be difficult to modify the TV's antenna to work with a converter but I haven't heard of anyone doing it yet. At most I would think that a couple of capacitors and maybe a matching transformer would be the most that would be needed.