$299 - not as bad as I had thought. I still like having the local stations in HD or SD.
I can understand the NFL requirement. My must have is Duke games in HD which was nice last year when every game was on ESPN HD. But now that they're rebuilding and UNC is ESPN's darling, we get moved to the ESPN2 schedule and TWC doesn't have ESPN2 HD yet.
re: local stations...I prefer to get those over antenna. In raleigh (as I am guessing is the case in charlotte as well) I am real close to the antennas and can pick up every channels SD and HD signal perfectly. This is really nice for when the sat signal goes out, the antenna is still (in my experience) still been good. And the local HD signal over the air, is a huge improvement over DTVs (and cable from what I have seen) HD version of locals. The DTV box is also nice in that it integrates your antenna signal into your onscreen guide and it is extremely easy to use once set up.
If interested, take a look at
www.antennaweb.org...this will tell you distance from the antennas, which will give you a good guage on likelihood of being able to pick up a signal.
On ESPN2, definitely agree...the biggest pain in the ass around here is regardless of whether ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU or the damn ocho is carrying it, if raycom carries it, the other feed gets blacked out, and raycom has no HD feeds (as of last year) and their SD pic quality is piss poor.