dce@hammer.UUCP (David Elliott) (01/03/85)
A couple of days ago, I bought a VCR (RCA VKT 400, if you are interested) and proceeded to hook it up to my cable TV system. In doing this, I found out that "standard" cable TV systems use 35 VHF channels, which is what my VCR expected, but that my system uses 59 channels. Any other person might have just given up and put the cable converter before the VCR, thus leaving the VCR on channel 3 or 4 and using the cable converter for tuning, but I paid extra money for electronic tuning and 4-event, multi-channel programming and I really wanted to use these features. I discussed my problem with some people at work, and came up with a switching system that would suit some of my needs, but would not allow me to record a show on channel 5 at 8:00am and then a show on channel 45 at 12:30pm without me going home to change the channel. I went to a video store (to sign up for my free video club membership) and looked at switching units to see if they had anything that would suit my needs. After describing my problem to the salesperson, he suggested a "Block Converter". This device, which sells for $40, converts the standard 35 VHF channels (including midband and superband) to UHF channels starting at channel 36, and also passes the unchanged VHF signal. I hooked my system up as follows: Cable TV signal is input to the block converter. Block converter UHF output is hooked to VCR UHF input. Block converter VHF output is hooked to cable converter input. Cable converter output (channel 3) is hooked to VCR VHF input. This gives me a couple of advantages over a switching unit: 1. I can program my recorder to record from any of channels 2-36 AND from one of the channels in the range 37-60. With a switching unit, I would only be able to get 2-36 OR one of 37-60. (Luckily, there are very few active channels in the 37-60 range, and I only want to record one of those). 2. I can watch any cable channel while recording from channels 2-36, and my TV is not cable-ready. The result is that I can now go to bed early enough that I can come to work before the load average gets very high, and still watch the shows that I'm paying for. I hope that this is of value to anyone that has ever had this type of problem. David Elliott tektronix!tekecs!dce