Me too: along with not wanting to put money into Rupert Murdoch's pocket. So, I've been holding out: and last week found an Echostar freeview decoder on the shelves at Sainsbury's knocked down to 60 squids. "Can't go wrong", thought I, as Echostar make high-end satellite decoders, and good old Sainsbury's won't quibble over a return if signal proves inadequate. (We have line-of-sight to the big regional transmitter at Mendip, but an old aerial (new one in the garage, new coil of CT100 ready to replace aging downlead currently tacked to side of house feeding Granny's teli while she lives with us in what will in future be the TV room: ban the idiot box from the lounge, hurrah!). Ch5 analogue signal is imperfect, cars and motorbikes with poorly-suppressed ignition systems cause brief bursts of interference when going past on the main road "above" the house (we're in a small quarry working with a steeply-sloping main road at the side of the house, so road is level with the base of the property at the eastern end and is about 20ft above it at the western end!). And a previous trial with a friend's pre-release terrestrial-TV-decoder was a No Signal washout.
So, I connected it up with little certainty of success. But it pulled in the signals without problem: the picture quality is better than on the analogue (less low-level noise/mush in dark varying backgrounds: only noticeable when you do direct A/B comparisons), none of the MPEG compression artefacts I remember from the same friend's setup at his place, and not only a second chance to see The Office Xmas Special on BBC3 this Sunday night just gone, but the overwhelming temptations of Bid-Up TV and its companion channel, PriceDrop TV (which sound like they might've been the channels to have paid our own Mr Liquorice his recent exhorbitant holiday working rates ;-). And the Guide stuff (more detailed program listings than teletext, served in one short-wait-time lump with no further delays) I find surprisingly useful. Passing spark-sources on the road affect the digital decoding less often (error-correction seems to do its stuff for lower amounts of interference), but more intrusive on the few occasions the error-correction can't cope - a burst of crackly noise and visible frozen rectangular blocks in the picture, lasting for no more than a few tenths of a second. So, the new aerial and downlead should be a win, but they're not urgent.
On the downside, I've found one Y2K bug already!! Hard to credit in a unit made in 2003, but that's Software Library Reuse for you: when you use the up-down button for setting the date of a timed event, going across a year boundary sets the century part of the date to 19xx; as I was doing this on New Year's Eve the year boundary was indeed close at hand! Workaround is to enter the date explicitly using the number keys on the remote. And I've had one software lockup (memory leak?) which lost access to the data services and to BBC3&BBC4, which I could fix only by pulling out the power cord for a Short Wait and letting it do its ReTuning proceedcake. If it loses its marbles a couple more times I'll think about taking it back to Sainsbury's; but for now I'm a happy terrestrial-digital-TV convert. Oh, it's nice getting a second source for receiving BBC6 and BBC7 radio, too, to complement the DAB tuner in my study (which gets hijacked by the lad when particular contemporary beat combos have Special Transmissions...)
So, I'd say go ahead with a trial install, trying to get your decoder from a shop which will let you bring it back for a full refund in a day or two if it doesn't work out...
Yeah. Some time we might put up a dish to get the Polish TV still sending on analogue satellite. But in the Conservation Area we live in I'm supposed to get planning perm even for one dish; and it's a hassle either installing it myself (even with a cheapie alignment meter from Satcure) or getting a dish installer in (who won't automatically point it at Astra rather than Hot Bird ;-). Apparently, a Sky box will work OK disconnected from the phone line most of the time: Google around for the net.gossip on this.
Cheers, Stefek