Generally when people refer to anolog vs. digital locals, they are refering to Over The Air Locals (via an antenna). Most people will talk about the difference as either having their locals being in HD, or just in Standard Definition.
I was trying to sort out the difference in the locals provided by Dish. For instance take WFRV, the Green Bay CBS affiliate. Dish provides the "analog" (the same as the NTSC OTA channel 5) on channel 9331 on 110. WFRV-DT, Channel 56* (the same as the ATSC OTA channel 56*) on DishChannel 5161 (from 61.5)
*I know that TV's are programmed to display this as Channel 5 but wanted to be technically accurate.
Now DishChannel 5161 may have HD programming if the station broadcasts HD programming. If the station decides to have 5 regular subchannels then they can't have HD programming at the same time. So calling 5161 "HD" seems to be misleading as is calling 9331 "SD" - since it isn't the station's digital signal at all. This is different than say, the History Channel HD (5313) which is exclusively HD programming (or at least mostly).
Sort of...The digital over the air signal, although it only occupies the same bandwidth as one channel, may be carrying multiple feeds. Usually in digital there is an HD and SD feed encoded into one channel (and they are generally the same programming, although the formating may be different). Digital Over the Air channels may carry other "sub-channels" as well
Not entirely sure what you are trying to state here as far as channels vs. networks. If you clarify the question I may be able to answer it.
False, As stated above, a local network can carry whatever feeds they want, as long as they don't exceed the bandwidth for one channel.
But they can't carry HD and multiple SD at the same time can they?
Nope, Only HD receivers can decode high definition signal. In the case of HD locals, Dish will encode them as SD before being uplinked to the satellite for non-HD receivers (sometimes resulting in unfavorable cropping due to HDs 16x9 aspect ration compared to SD at 4x3).
Really? In the case of OTA non-HD digital TV sets can display HD programming (with letterboxing etc. because of the different aspect ratios. Unless you are saying that the HD broadcast is accompanied by an identical SD signal. I just thought that an HD signal uses the whole channel by itself.