LOS ANGELES (AP) - Nearly 800,000 calls were received by a federal hot line last week from people confused about the nationwide move on Friday to drop analogue TV signals and broadcast only in digital.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said that about 317,450 calls went into the help line, 1-888-CALL-FCC, on Friday alone, the day analog signals were cut off. Another 102,000 came in Saturday by 6 p.m. Eastern time.

The total is still below the 600,000 to three million callers that the FCC expected in early March would call on transition day.

The move to all-digital was delayed from February 17, and ramped up efforts at spreading the word is credited with roughly halving the number of unprepared households since then. Nielsen Co. put the number of unready homes at 2.8 million, or 2.5 percent of the total television market, as of a week last Sunday.

FCC acting chairman Michael Copps said on Saturday that if it were baseball, the digital transition is now closer to home plate.

"We're safe on third right now," he said. He added that thousands of FCC staff would continue to answer phones and help people whose TVs no longer work properly, at least through June.

"We all need a bit of patience and perseverance," he said. "This is a momentous change and it'll take time to get it right."

Dozens of mostly Hispanic TV watchers visited and called the Mercy Center, a community centre in the Bronx, New York, to get more help.

A staff of three has been on hand seven days a week for the last month.

"Up to now, it's been people wanting the equipment," said Judith Criado, the director of education at the centre. "Today, everyone who has called has the equipment but they just don't know how to actually see the channels."

About a third of Friday's calls to the FCC were still about federal coupons to pay for digital converter boxes, an indication that at least 100,000 people still did not have the right equipment to receive digital signals.

Another third of the calls were handled by live agents, and 30 percent of those were about how to operate the converter boxes. The FCC said most of the converter box questions were resolved when callers were told to re-scan the airwaves for digital frequencies.

Over 20 percent of the live calls were about reception issues. Antennas can be fickle, because digital signals travel differently than analogue ones.

A weakly received analog channel might be viewable through some static, but channels broadcast in the digital language of ones and zeros are generally all or nothing.

"People just needed to upgrade their antenna or return the lower quality one for stronger antennas," said Debbie Byrd, an FCC staffer who only had three visitors to her Saturday help session at a library in the south-central Los Angeles area.

A majority of the 100 million US households with TV sets were not affected by the drop of analogue signals, because they receive them through their cable or satellite company.

As of Saturday, the FCC said 20 TV stations that had been on the air went dark because they had not set up their digital broadcast equipment yet.

The largest volume of calls to the FCC on Friday came from the Chicago area, followed by Dallas-Fort Worth, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

With 4,000 staffers manning the phones on Friday, the average wait time per call was 4.6 minutes.

The FCC said its hot line was on track to receive another 150,000 calls on Saturday.

The National Association of Broadcasters said that 278 stations it surveyed nationwide received 35,500 calls on Friday, and the vast majority were resolved by re-scanning.