I’m living in house with a couple other people as is standard for University students. I have a cable outlet in my room. I have connected it up to my external tv tuner device (Hauppage winTV USB) so that I can watch TV on my laptop. When I set the thing to autoscan, it only picks up the few antenna stations. We subscribe to Rogers digital TV.
Does the fact that we have the digital service prevent me from watching cable tv on a “regular” television? This can’t be the case, as one guy has tv in his room and gets cable in.
Perhaps the cable is just not connected at the one end? :rolleyes:
It is actually a problem with my tuner? (It shouldn’t be - it worked fine back home).
Anyway, I was just wondering if there was some way to verify what’s coming out of my cable outlet. Is there some voltage I should I expect to see? I have an oscope; is there some signal I should expect to see?
The landlord is rather annoying so I like to avoid contacting him as much as possible. Also, the electrical box is in someone’s bedroom so I’m not [necessarily] free to just go in and look at stuff.
Perhaps try asking the guy in the other room if you can plug into his cable for a second to see if you get signal? Anyway, digital cable service certainly requires a digital cable box to decode the signal. I’m not sure if the analog (<125) channels are carried in digital form, or if the digital stream is broadcast alongside the normal analog channels.
If you have digital cable, you won’t be able to watch the digital stations with a TV tuner card, but you should be able to get the analog stations (at least with Comcast, only the stations above 100 are digital).
Typically TV tuners have a selectable option for “antenna” and “cable” tuning. The frequencies for channels 2 through 13 (VHF, for you old timers) are the same in both modes, but above that they differ. If you’re able to tune channels in the low range, but nothing above 13, this might explain the problem. If so, there is probably a checkbox somewhere on a configuration dialog for your tuner software that will set the device to “cable” tuning mode.
Anyway at first I had a digital tuner. The digital channels were over 100. The analog were under 100. I could get analog thru my TV set BUT not my digital.
About 2 months ago, I notice the analog channels were now subject to “this channel temp unavailable” and breaking up in a digital like manner. I retried and COMCAST had converted ALL channel (except over the air and the public license channels) to digital format. So now you can’t get anything but those over the air without a digital box.
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