I just got cable in my apartment, but for some reason the TV I brought with me refuses to tune to half of the channels. If I go past about channel 49, it skips back to channel 2., but I know for a fact that I am supposed to have channels way into the 80s. If I key in the channel directly, it goes back to channel 2, also.
It’s a fairly old Toshiba and I don’t have the original remote. I’ve been using a universal remote that I programmed for the TV, instead. the cable installation guy said something about needing to get the TV to scan for available channels, but I’m not sure how to do that, as there’s no “scan” option on the remote or the TV.
Is there anything I can do to re-set the TV so it will pick up the channels it’s supposed to?
See if there’s a menu or program button on the TV’s front. If so, scroll through the menu options until you can direct the set to learn all available channels. You may also need to search for an antenna or input option, such as air or CATV, and set that appropriately.
I’m not at the apartment tonight but I’ll check the model number tomorrow and get back to you. For now, all I can say is it’s an old Toshiba, big and heavy and probably about 10 years old. (where does one find a model number?)
It’s got the little switch set to “CATV” already, but the buttons on the front only change the color and such - no menu at all.
Model number is usually on the back someplace, often on the “bulge” for the CRT neck. Is there a menu button on the remote? Might be able to access it that way. Usually the channel scan function is under something like “Setup”.
It might not be able to. Up until recently I had a TV that was sufficiently old that it only tuned channels 2-13, so I also had a converter to get the rest of the cable channels. However, there was a large chunk in the middle of the range that it would refuse to tune to - I could tune any channel up to the bottom of that range and then if I hit the “up” button it would skip over that chunk of numbers; if I explicitly selected one of those numbers on my remote it would ignore me. It wasn’t a “programming” issue - a power failure made it forget which were my “favourite” channels but didn’t affect that gap, and in any case typing a channel number directly wasn’t affected by the settings for my “favourite” channels. And no, there was no antenna/CATV switch.
So, it’s possible your TV may be like my converter and simply not be able to get certain channels.
Is there a panel on the front of the televison with a setup button? There’s one on my 15 year old toshiba, and I had to use it to change the tv to the cable option, instead of air, then use the edit channels option to manually program in all the available stations.
Ok, I visited my TV today (I’m not moved into the apartment yet because the fridge is shot)and got a good look at it.
There’s no setup button. There’s an antenna/CATV switch on the back which is snapped off. It must be set to CATV, though, since my TV is picking up cable… just not all the stations. Right? The other buttons on the front are all to do with color and brightness. There’s one button that says “ABC” but I don’t know what it’s for.
The model number is CT938C. (Toshiba, manufactured in 1988)
Any ideas?
My boyfriend suggested we just hook up a VCR to the TV and run the cable through that, so we can scan for channels, but I’d really prefer just being able to get the channels off the TV alone.
If your TV was made in 1988, it probably doesn’t have any onscreen menus–it’s almost 20 years old, not ten. In fact, it probably isn’t capable of tuning any cable channels greater than 49, because cable-ready TVs of that era were fairly limited compared to today’s sets. Looks like you’ll have to use the VCR.
I suspect that the cable/antenna switch is actually set to antenna. I think the switch just controls how high a channel number you can select. My ~15 year old set (not hooked up to cable) will tune up to 69 in antenna mode, but over 100 in cable mode.
Not quite. There is another difference between off-air reception and CATV: broadcast channels 2 through 13 are in the VHF band, while channels 14 to 69 are UHF; however, all CATV channels are VHF. If it was the case that the OP’s TV was set to off-air mode, it would only be able to tune CATV channels 2-13 and no higher. Since it can tune CATV all the way to 49, that means it’s in CATV mode, and suggests that the TV is simply at its limit.
