A spring scale is not a bad device. Over time, metal fatigue will cause the spring to sag, but there is a little screw adjustment some place for you to compensate for that. The advantage an electronic scale has over a mechanical one is higher resolution. You can get 1/10th to 1/100th of a gram resolution, which a mechanical one cannot achieve. A mechanical scale is in general lineal in response, whereas with an electronic one you are not very sure with the cheap ones. A mechanical scale�s spring response is subjected to temperature changes, and an electronic scale is normally temperature compensated by using a thermistor type of device. As you have indicated, a great advantage with electronic scales is the feature of auto-zeroing to subtract the weight of the container. I suppose this will cancel out some problems of the load cell going out of calibration. I believe the load cell is a resistive device, and therefore may not be classified as a transducer. A fulcrum balance type of mechanical scale eliminates a lot of spring type scale�s problems. dcarch

Feb 1 2009 the FCC will cease ALL analog broadcasts. Your Analog TV will only be useful for cable or sat. In order to view any OTA broadcasts you will need to buy an extra Digital box to convert the digital broadcast to Analog for Analog TV's I am assuming that you already have the digital Tv's You do NOT need any digital equipment to record digital TV all digital TV's that I know of have analog outputs. That being said jimisham is correct, Digital is either good or bad unlike analog which will snow up you can still see a signal. If you have drop outs you need a better antenna or point your antenna better. Maybe you have a VHF only antenna or the VHF is a bigger part of what you have. You will still get signals even with rabbit ears but you have to be close to the source. The best bang for the buck is a CM4228 cost about $50 is UHF only which is what all digital channels are and will be, but will get ch 8-12 pretty good also untill the cease to broadcast on those channels. http://www.hdtvprimer.com/ANTENNAS/cm4228.html , if the stations are in different directions you will need a rotor. One good thing is digital travels further with less signal strength and at this time many stations are NOT broadcasting digital at full power yet. I use a CM4228 and get all the network stations at about 50 miles from here is High Definition without drop outs.

Depends what you mean by "the sticks". Exactly where do you live? OTA digital tv could be available to you depending on where you live, but you'll still need a converter box to receive it. Check with your local stations to see if they are transmitting OTA digital, or, like the guy said, go dish.

Welcome to the forum, Jeff. Hope to see more of you around here! Johnliu, I used an old spring scale up until about a year ago. Love having a digital scale. Use it a lot for 'scaling' dough when I make hamburger & brat buns. Nice to have a uniform size so that they all bake evenly and that I get the X amount of buns that I'm sposed to get out of a recipe. (I note the weight for whatever bun I'm making on the recipe card.) Also comes in very handy when I make a layer cake...for getting the same amount of batter in each pan. Another use I have for it is checking the weight of a prepackaged food item...does that 2# sack of pinto beans really weigh a full 2 pounds? Hint: Sometimes they don't. Bonus factor is that the digital scale takes up a lot less room than the old spring scale. I tend to use mine quite often so it lives on the counter. Last thing is that I made sure that the scale uses common batteries, i.e., AA's. First scale that I got used some not so common (and expensive) batteries. Turned out to be a defective scale that went thru a set of batteries every couple of weeks! We returned that scale to the store & ordered a different one from Amazon.