rob@genrad.UUCP (Rob Wood) (10/08/83)
I just had my local cable tv installed. I am four years back from where I was yesterday. 1. I can not watch one station and video-tape another. 2. I can not use my video-recorder to change channels when I'm not home. 3. I let them take my antennae wire out and put their cable thru the channel under my floor, I should have made them fish it. 4. The quality of my basic VHF channels has been cut from crisp clear pictures to dull, snowy, shadowy images. 5. The installers work on Saturday but I have to wait till Tuesday for the service people to fix the picture. 6. I now have 3 remote units to manipulate, TV, VCR, Cable. 7. They put a protector type connector to prevent the cable being moved from their decoder box so that if I want to use my TV's or VCR's cable tuning capability and not watch the premium channels I can not. Can you give me any technical help on what I can do? Rob Wood (decvax!genrad!rob)
jsf007@trsvax.UUCP (10/13/83)
#R:genrad:-359700:trsvax:54900011:000:1431 trsvax!jsf007 Oct 11 08:21:00 1983 It sounds to me like you have one of those cable companies that requires a decoder in the subscriber's home. Some cable companies simply filter out the channels that the subscriber does not pay for, but it sounds like your carrier sends all the premium channels and gives you a decoder for the ones you want (all the decoders are in the single box you have). But to the business at hand... I had a similar problem when I lived in another city. The solution costs money (not too much, though). I will assume that your TV as well as your VCR are cable ready. First, the incoming cable signal is input to a splitter. You would want a two out, one in splitter. Run a lead from one of the splitter outputs to the coax input on the VCR. Then hookup the VCR to the TV the way you would in the pre-cable days. The other splitter output goes to the input of the of the decoder. The output of the decoder goes into another piece of hardware -- a up converter (some call it a modulator). Its purpose is to take the VHF band and modulate it up the UHF band (so the channel 3 output of the cable box becomes channel 34 or something). You will probably need a 75 to 300 hundred ohm balun to connect the ouput of the up converter to the VCR UHF input. To watch your premium channels, tune in channel 34 and then select the cable channel of your choice on the cable box. I hope this helps... Steve Fintel ...!trsvax!jsf007