I was watching PBS's analog station tonight, (Imagemakers), and noticed that the image was too narrow. I changed the aspect to 16:9, and the picture looks perfect. It looks like an HD program, except for a 1 cm black strip on the top and bottom of the screen.

I enjoyed watching the program in widescreen mode, and realized I had never seen this before. (A widescreen broadcast squeezed to an SD frame).

PBS is good at their beg-a-thons, but they don't seem too hip on technology.

when the local PBS-HD channel shows a concert or whatever, it's in HD, but when it's begging time and they switch to their studio cameras, it's 4:3. sometimes when they switch feeds, they forget to switch the aspect ratio and the picture gets screwy, either a stretched studio feed or HD feed in 4:3...

That's one possibility, but I was writing about my pbs analog station. It usually broadcasts standard SD programs. This one, however, was compressed vertically, and when set to 16:9 mode, looked almost as good as the HD channel.