mikesil
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Feb 9, 2010, 7:31 AM
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The Mystery of Clear QAM
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Am I receiving 75 channels of Clear QAM?
A while back Comcast announced a transition to digital and provided folks like myself with a free set top box so we could feed our old (but lovable) glass tube analog tv. Simple as pie: digital rf in, analog rf out (on channel 3) and one more remote to get kicked under the sofa.
Then, I buy a small, inexpensive digital tv for the bedroom and feed it off a splitter before the set top box. I just plugged it in and it gets all 75 channels. No Captain Midnight secret decoder box, no decryption of any kind that I can see, yet it gets all the channels including the ones I pay extra for. So, are they encrypted, or not?
Why do I care?
I would like to buy a new digital tuner/recordrer card for the PC. Right now I can can record analog with my old analog card, but look at what the signal has to go through:
In the set top box:
qam to the digital tuner/detector
digital to the d/a converter
analog video to the rf modulator
In my present analog tv card:
NTSC rf to the analog tuner/detector
analog video to the a/d converter
digital to the hard disk
Actually, the quality is not bad, considering. But I would like to record the digital without all that conversion. Is any way of determining which channels are clear? Can I expect a new digital tv card to just plug in and work like the new tv? I'm sure someone at Comcast knows, but the ones who answer my calls are clueless.
Thanks, mikesil@teamlogic.com
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