Unlike most TV stations, New Age's CW-MNT duopoly in Portland-Auburn, Maine (DMA 76), is no longer fretting about the DTV transition and the analog shutoff.

That's all behind them now.

Deciding not to wait for the mandated Feb. 17 deadline for ending analog service, the Wilkes-Barre, Pa.-based New Age pulled the plug on CW affiliate WPXT on Aug. 18 and on MNT affiliate WPME just last week.

(New Age owns WPXT and operates WPME, which is owned by MPS Media, New Age's duopoly partner in several markets.)

The premature switch carried a bit of a risk. The market has 408,000 TV households, and, of those, about 12 percent of those or nearly 50,000 rely solely on over-the-air reception.

But, in this interview with TVNewsday Editor Harry A. Jessell, Doug Finck, general manager of the duopoly, says the mini-transition has gone well.

The stations have been able to handle the few dozen complaints from viewers, they have alerted the market to the transition in a way no number of PSAs could possibly match, they have begun saving on the electric bill, and they have learned a few lessons that they are willing to share with others. Chief among them: "It's the antenna, stupid."

An edited transcript:

Why did you decide to go digital early?

We couldn't think of any logical reason not to. We were the first station in the state to go stereo, we were the first to have a Web site, and we were the first to do streaming video on the Web sites. We just thought it would be appropriate to be the first digital operation in the state of Maine.

We put on our digital transmitters a couple of years ago when the FCC required it. They were all debugged, and everything was working just fine.

How has the switch to digital impacted your coverage?

We opted to replicate our Grade B from our analog so, theoretically, it shouldn't have made any change. What we've actually found is that there are some places where it comes in just fine and other places where people have to work a little harder to pick it up.

How much do you figure you're saving on the electric bill?

We cut our power bill in half. We're saving $10,000 per month per transmitter.

That's a pretty big deal on a market your size.

Yes. It's another incentive to move in that direction.

How about the cable systems? Have they been able to pick up your signals without any trouble?

Time Warner is the dominant cable operation in the state. We fiber directly to them, so it's not a big issue. They in turn provide fiber carriage of our signals to some of the smaller cable operations. So I think there were two or three very small cable systems that were picking us up off the air, and we talked with them. They've got the antennas and the digital tuners, and we haven't had any problems with any of them. We notified both Dish and DirecTV of our intentions, and they switched over and started picking us up digitally. When it came time to shut down the analog, none of our distribution partners were left behind.

You've now had over a month of experience with this on the CW and a few days with the MNT. What's the reaction from the viewers?

We got the biggest reaction in the first 10 days after WPXT switched, and that was from viewers who were calling, saying, oh, gosh, I saw the announcements, I knew you were going to do this, I went out and I got the converter box, but I can't get your station.

Not that I would ever say this to a viewer, but, among us chickens, it's the antenna, stupid. It really comes down to the antenna. We would find that there are places where our engineers would set up a digital TV in somebody's driveway with a little 10-foot mast, and the signal would come in, maximum signal, full bars. Then we'd walk into the home, and it would just evaporate.

In some of those, we'd find that there was aluminum siding on the exterior of the house that would create a problem. In some, we found that there was aluminum-foil insulation that caused problems. In some, we found that they were trying to bring in the signal with rabbit ears, which, of course, are a VHF antenna and no good for picking up our UHF signals.

The second part of that is, once you get a decent antenna, then you have to point it in the direction of the transmitting tower. Once we've been able to do that, people seem to be able to pick up the station. We've found very few instances where, after all of our help and all of our visits and all of our support, we can't get them the signal.

As long as they're willing to step up to a higher-quality antenna, probably an outdoor antenna, they can get us.

How many such calls have you received?

I'm going to say 30 to 50 calls and e-mails.

That's it?

And the majority of them were problems we could work through on the phone.

One of the things that gets a little tricky is, if you set up one of the converter boxes, it automatically scans the spectrum, and it locks in all the stations that it can pick up.

Well, if the antenna is not sufficient or you're pointing your antenna in the wrong direction, it's not going to pick your signal up. What happens is, the consumer gets a better antenna or reorients it in the right direction. The problem then is that they don't know to rescan or they get confused by the channel numbers.

WPXT has always been known as channel 51, but our digital channel is 43. So we get people calling up and saying, well, I keep punching in 51 and nothing comes up, and we say, okay, this is going to sound counterintuitive, but you need to punch in 43. Hey, there it is: 51 in on 43.

Do you have any sense of what it's doing to your viewership?

No, we don't. We're not a metered market, so it's going to be a while before we see the results of anything, but, anecdotally, we have had a relatively small number of calls. We haven't heard from any advertisers about the sky falling. Obviously, cable and satellite, which constitutes 88 percent of the market, hasn't been affected at all. You're really talking about 12 percent, and, frankly, most of them are out in the far rural edges of the market. I mean, they're not people right in downtown Portland or Lewiston. They're really 30 miles away.

Now CW and MNT aren't the most highly rated networks. What do you think would have happened if the Hearst-Argyle and Gannett stations had pulled the analog plug?

Clearly, they have larger shares of the entire audience than we do. So I would suspect that they would get a few more people calling than we have gotten. Having looked at some of the coverage maps, my guess is that they're going to have the same problem in the far rural reaches of the marketplace. They're getting people in the rural areas saying, hey, where's your signal? I can't pick it up.

What has been the reaction of your broadcast brethren to your move?

The ones I've talked to think it's great that we're willing to be the scouts. One of them laughed and said the scout always gets the arrow between the eyes. They think it's great that we're willing to go first and get the publicity and have the world know that this is really happening. Also, our engineers talk with the engineers from the other stations and share anecdotal information about what's happening.

What did you do to prepare the market?

Obviously, we've been running all of the PSAs, the half-hour shows and all the other things that we're required, and we did a few soft shutdowns prior to the official pulling of the plug to give people notice. At WPXT, we were able to separate our analog signal from the fiber that feeds cable and the digital transmitters, so we could talk directly and exclusively to the analog, over-the- air viewers.

We were interrupting programs with two-minute messages saying, look, if you can see this, you're one of the people that's going to have to do something because we're going to be changing here. Then, for several days before the final switch, we didn't run any programming. We just had a CG on the screen all the time just saying, That's it. We've stopped programming, and this channel is going off the air in the near future.

You still have the PSA obligations right? So what are you doing with that time?

We still have the NAB PSAs that say all stations are converting. We're still airing them.

What are your multicasting plans?

Right now, we have a digital subchannel on WPME that we created. In fact, we may be one of the only stations in the country that has a 100-percent original, non-repurposed digital subchannel that also happens to be profitable. It's a thing we've created called the Maine Visitors' Channel, and it's designed to speak to tourists who are visiting Maine and staying in hotels. We have gone around to the leading hotels in the area and set up UHF antennas so we can inject the channel into their house systems.

We also have an arrangement with RTN, and we're looking at possibly rolling that out. We've got a couple of other local concepts that we're talking about right now.

So how is business in Portland?

It's like most markets. We miss our friends in the automotive business. It was fun when they were around. It's a little quieter without them. The politicians have stepped in, and, while certainly we don't get the lion's share of that, we get some of it. But it's a different world than it was a few years ago. It just means that we have to find different ways to generate revenue.