[DQDick]

I checked both those mapping tools and according to them I have a wonderful variety of TV stations out here in the boonies. The problem is it's a lie. The reason they're wrong is that they are using the coverage maps provided by the stations to justify what they charge for advertising. I fought with Dairy Queen over this for years. In Council Grove, where the store is located (16 miles closer to the stations than I am), you can't buy a single part for an over the air antenna in either hardware store. If you asked them why they'll explain that they just don't work here and so there is no need to stock parts. Any home that can afford it has either satellite or cable. The stations, however, want to claim as much coverage as possible so if their signal occasionally skips out to some far point, or gets there in the winter but not in the summer heat, they'll claim everything in between. Before DQ started buying mostly cable my ad dollars were almost completely wasted because my customers never saw the commercials. Worse than that sometimes they came in asking for a new product we didn't have because they saw it being tested on either the East or West coast feeds on the satellite. I got deeply involved in this because we were talking about over $40,000 per year going down the drain and we couldn't afford to waste 50¢.