On stations 90 and 91 of my local cable services are two strange channels. They show some sort of monitoring/measurement readings but I have no clue what they’re for or why this is being broadcast over my cable.
The following link shows two screen captures:
http://www23.brinkster.com/boxofstupid/tv.html
These two stations have been around for years and years…and we’ve had no luck getting an answer from the cable company. Is this part of some government conspiracy?? :dubious:
I had forgotten about that. Before I moved about two years ago our cable station had that on one of the channels. All ours showed however, was the graph, at least yours has words. I also remember that the graph was higher late at night. I hope someone knows what it is.
One other thing, before replying, I did a quick usenet search and found several posts asking the same question and no one seems to know the answer.
That’s my favourite channel…
Wow… wish I had cool channels like this.
Quintas, our channels were originally like that - just the graph, lacking any titles. It was only in the last ~2 or so that the words appeared.
On the local “graph” channel here we have an older TV with a graph on it (changes slightly from time to time), a small fuzzy doll on top with googly eyes, and a thermometer (almost always at room temperature).
Once Palve saw the waist of someone as they walked around the room and moved a box into the background. The box was gone a couple of days later.
I’ll try to get a screenshot of the channel in the next day or two and put a link to it.
I’m totally intruigued.
Is this one of those channels that constantly has a ‘bulls-eye’, Indian head, and graph on it? Or maybe just them funky colored bars?
Tripler
Enquiring minds want to know.
Well, I’ve exceeded my bandwidth…anyway, yes, its one of those channels with a crazy graph on it.
It’s past midnight and your bandwidth was available again so I was able to see the pictures. IANA Cable Guy but as a total WAG I’ll say that maybe this is info about the current cable signal strength at the source or something similar. Maybe a cable guy could use this info to diagnose problems with your reception. Maybe he can hook some kind of meter into the cable and check to make sure that your signal matches the current info on the graph.
Like I said, it’s a complete WAG. For all I know it’s martian spies communicating with each other through your cable system. 
If this is digital cable we’re talking about, this might be it. But old-school cable, I don’t think, would be able to have channels that showed location-specific stats.
If it’s the old-timey cable we’re taling about, it’s probably a chart showing the cable station’s satelite reception. Quintas mentioned that his showed higher readings at night, and I believe that most types of reception are stronger after dark.
Just a guess though.
Happy
Those are spectrum analyzer screens. They show how the signal strength across a band of freqencies. The horizontal axis is frequency, from 25 MHz to 40 MHz. The vertical axis is dBmv, which means millivolts relative to 1 mV, on a logarithmic scale.
This could be the signal they are transmitting, or it could be the signal being recieved at some point. The purpose is to allow an engineer or tech to see how the system as a whole is working.
Ah. My roomie, who used to work in that field, tells me that 40 MHz is just below the usual cable channel 2, so this is probably either a signal the head end is recieving fro a satellite, or a reverse channel, that is, the signal cable boxes could send back to the cable company.
I work* for a company that deals with TV production equipment and I second Kalahnikov’s answer about signal receiving strength, most probably either incoming satellite or (more likely) out-bound, measuring it as it’s leaving the station’s switcher. As for why it’s showing up, at a guess I’d say that somebody mis-wired something into their routing switcher. It’s 10:00pm here, but I’ll try to get somebody from our engineering department to take a look at it tommorrow. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get a positive answer if nobody else has provided one before then.
Peace-DESK
Here’s the strange cable channels I get …
Channel 2 - “City Government,” but in reality, it’s just clouds. That’s it. 24 hours of white fluffy clouds.
Channel 611 - “Diagnostics and System Information” with Mexican accordion music in the background.
Our system has two of these channels, right next to each other, up near the scrambled porn. (damn, that makes my eyes hurt after fifteen or twenty minutes)
One for incoming signal and one for outgoing signal makes sense.
I used to work for a company that sends all of the non-local news stories to ABC and NBC news rooms to one of “our” servers via satellite. It definately looks like inbound\outbound satellite signal. We used to have the exact same screen on a huge monitor in the reception area.
Actually, it’s centered on 25 MHz with a span of 40 MHz, so it’s 5-45 MHz on that chart. Still below the channel frequencies (in the US, at least). What frequencies does Canada use?
A few additional observations…the top picture (channel 90) is always stuck on a date from 3 years ago. Whilst the 2nd picture (channel 91) is always on the current date, but its time always lags about 20 minutes behind the current time.
This is what I found regarding channel frequencies in Canada:
54.000-72.000 Television Broadcasting (same standards as US channels)
BTW, its analog cable.
