Cable Co. claims this was my fault:
 

One of my digital-cable STB's has been frequently rebooting and displaying error messages (about once every 2 hours). SO they send someone over, and he claims the box was 'going into high-temperature shutdown' because my TV was old and gives off too much heat. Boy, glad it was an SS set...he would've been calling the fire dept. if it was a tube set. But I mean COME ON....Ambient room temperature is at 71F, I had nothing on top of the cable box, and it was sitting right atop the tv (1982 GE).

Plus, I've had the same box paired with the same TV for almost a year now. Well, at least he gave me a brand new box (a Samsung) without much ado.

But doesn't this sound unlikely?

It was not your fault, your cable company is retarded. Those boxes are the worst chinese junk they can force on everyone, I've had several fail like yours. The same thing with all the rebooting and mine froze a lot. Glad they gave you a new box like they're supposed to.

Cable box quality has gone down in the last decade. I have one that I need to keep turned off, or unplug it and plug it back in if I leave it on just so on demand will work.

That's a load of bullcrap. Like has aready been said, those boxes are not of the best quality anyway. And, I've seen some STB's that actually ran hotter than the TV it was sitting on.

I have not had any personal experience with the new digital cable boxes and don't plan to as long as analog cable service is available. Don't know how much longer that will last as they just dropped 4 channels from the analog package and will probably be dropping more until it gets to the point where only local channels + 2 or 3 others will be on analog (Ch. 2-13).

Glad i'm not crazy, thanks guys! Around here the analog signal has gotten very noisy over the years; my guess is that they are just letting it die and aren't maintaining it. I don't think it's my house connection since it was redone once or twice. Shame since a box-less setup works wonders on 80's sets with electronic tuners...especially after the dtv switchover

I just use the VCR tuner to watch anything above 13 on my knob tuned Zenith. They're not maintaining the analog signal too well here, either; but, it wouldn't be cost effective for us to rent a digital cable box for each TV in the house that's on cable.

I got three DTB (digital transport boxes) from Comcast when they went digital a few months ago. All three worked for a few days and went dead. Re-pinging them from their website went nowhere.

A new Samsung HD set, a used Sony XBR set and a DVD recorder with a digi tuner fixed all. All have QAM tuners and I get everything...although the channels are in the upstream Comcast mapping. No HD from the premium levels but that is expected.

I have all my basic channels but mixed up and subject to monthly re-mapping. So what if CNN is not on 31 but 103.7. I can live with that. And the OTA HD channels as must-carry are better than the version that any Comcast box would pass after massive compression.

Several years ago, I had digital cable from Time Warner. The box ran hot, but nowhere nearly as hot as Zenith2134's. I did not have the box on top of my TV; the converter was on the lowest shelf of my entertainment unit (which now is occupied by my DVD player). The box, a Motorola STB, worked extremely well the short time I had it (a couple of years) before digital cable rates went up. I now have bare-bones basic cable running more or less directly to the set (local channels only, plus WGN America, C-SPAN 1, and a couple of religious channels, to say nothing of QVC) and no problems whatsoever with heat buildup from anything.

Every once in a while I toy with the idea of dropping cable and getting a DTV converter box, but every time I read about these boxes getting exceptionally warm (and failing within six months or so) I forget about it. I don't honestly think a DTV box with rabbit ears would work in my situation anyway, as I live in an apartment building and cannot use an outside TV antenna. Rabbit ears, unless they are the expensive amplified kind, won't work here either (and even if they did work at all, it probably would be a crap shoot as I will explain), because I'm some 45 miles from the Cleveland TV stations. It's ironic because my FM radio reception here, using an external Terk "tower" antenna atop my desk with my stereo system (and the built-in whip antennas on my FM portables, to say nothing of short wire antennas on my vintage FM radios), is excellent. I guess the difference is the all-or-nothing nature of DTV signals, and the fact that they are far weaker than FM radio stations.

BTW, why is it now impossible to hear audio from channel 6 TV stations on 87.75 MHz? (Back in my old neighborhood, long before DTV, I used to be able to hear channel eight audio at the bottom of my FM dial.) I thought the sound carriers of digital television signals were on the same frequencies as the old analog ones, unless the DTV stations are on UHF channels. I always thought that the audio carrier of, say, channel six would be 86.5 MHz (4.5 MHz above the lower edge of the channel), regardless of whether the signal was digital or analog. Why I was getting channel 8 audio on 86.5 MHz, however, is still a mystery to me, even to this day, since the sound carrier for that channel is (or was, with analog TV) 184.5 MHz. I was living in a Cleveland suburb at the time that was perhaps 30+ miles from the stations. Hmmm. :scratch2:

Jeff,

Your 87.75 problem is the same as here in Phila. I used to like listening to the Ch 6 news on my car FM on the way home. And then digital reared it's ugly head.

My Ch 6 kept it's same assignment but my Cadillac FM radio did not make the change. It is analog and will never be able to figure out ones and zeros. Digital transmission is useless on anything analog.

The carrier may be the same, but the transport is nothing that anything analog was built for.

The audio on digital TV stations is just a stream of data packets mixed in with the rest of the data packets (video, closed captions, program guide, other audio and video sub-channels). There is nothing resembling a discrete part of the RF spectrum of a TV channel being dedicated to the audio for that station.

Zenith2134, I'm glad you got your box replaced without any real trouble, and thanks for the laugh at the latest "stupid cable-TV company tricks" story. That was a new one.

Speaking of stupid cable company tricks, this old lady that I know had the cable company out to install her cable. She was told that her TV (an '81 Philco with rotary tuning) was too old to accept cable and that she couldn't be connected. BULLCRAP! Do they not know what a matching transformer is? She eventually gave me the set when it developed loose connections and a weak CRT. I patched it up and used it for about a year - ON CABLE!

I talked to the guy who connected our cable and he said that there are plenty of ancient TV's that people want connected - to which they refuse.

If they ever refuse to connect any TV of mine because it's "too old", I won't get a new TV. I'll just go with another signal source.

I think back to the '80's and '90's when those same old TV's were connected to cable and usually had a analog cable box sitting on top of them.

Are cable installers today that stupid or are they just trying to convince people that they need a new TV?

I made the Comcast guy hook up my '49 motorola 7" and he didn't bat an eye. He said as long as I had a matching transformer, I was good to go. He went on to say that he had a Moto "golden view" set from the 40's that still worked! For once, I was impressed.

My girlfriend works for Comcast, and we had a discussion about the quality of boxes the other day (I had a relay on my box die after less than a year). According to her, box quality has really dipped down since Motorola cut production on their boxes, forcing Comcast to go with other vendors to make them. The worst quality box by far is made by a company called Scientific Atlanta. They have pallets of these things that just failed right out of the box. General Instrument also makes a decent box as well. But yes, Comcast has bad boxes-LOTS of them!

Ugggghhh. Those Scientific Atlanta boxes ARE the worst, that's what they keep giving me. Slow hardware, poorly designed menus, poor construction ect. Mine runs at about 140 degrees Fahrenheit at the processor and power supply and it sits NEXT to a 2004 Sony KV-30HS420. The tv is not why this junk overheats, that's for sure.

I had Scientific Atlanta digital boxes for years, and they did have to be changed out frequently. The hardware, IMHO, is a major reason why people are switching to Verizon fiber around here. All I hear from neighbors and friends is how bad the cable menus and equipment is. And I certainly agree...I remember when they switched to the Samsungs, the switched outlet feature went away. Makes me wonder how long it is before the F connector is gone as well.

(Knocks heavily on wood) My Charter Scientific Atlanta hokie box has only had to be replaced once in the 4-5 years I've had it...Guess I'm ahead of the game...But w/summer thunderstorm/power outage season around the corner, we'll see...

---

I didn't care for those SA boxes even back in the analog days. They just seemed cheap built and they ran hot. Before Comcast started using SA brand boxes, they were using Jerrold brand converters. Those seemed to be heavier, better built converters. Somewhere, I've got one of those old Jerrold 36 channel converters with the row of mechanical buttons and a three position switch to select which row of channels you wish to choose from.

The cable techs are probably told to make everything the customers' fault. And if your TV was making too much heat, what would he say about a plasma? Those belch out more heat than a blast furnace.

Charles

That's too bad. The switched outlet made it easy to turn your TV on and off with your cable remote. I don't think Time Warner (the cable provider in my area) has any plans to replace its digital set-tops any time soon with ones that don't have the switched AC outlet, but that's just a thought I had--they might just do something like that eventually, or perhaps they have already and I don't know it. My cable runs more or less directly to my TV, no cable box (basic service, broadcast channels only); I say more or less because I have an RF modulator and a VCR connected to the TV as well, and the cable line from the wall connects to an input on the modulator. There is a jumper line, I think, from the modulator output to the TV antenna input on the VCR, with the output of the latter connecting to the TV's own antenna port via another cable. Lots of cables behind the set, but it works. :yes:

If the manufacturers of cable set-tops eventually do away with one or both F connectors (cable input as well as the output to the TV), how on earth will the boxes connect to the cable and the subscriber's television? :scratch2: A wireless connection from the box to the cable comes to mind; however, the connection from the box to the user's TV could be a bit more of a problem without a connector.

It's already gone on a lot of boxes now. That's the way it was when I had that Directv garbage. I had to use a modulator for all my sets :mad:

I used to work for a local access studio for a cable company three years ago... Back then I used to talk to the installer guys quite a bit. They always told me I wouldn't believe how many older TVs they ran across. They would never refuse connecting any of them, but they did say that the older TVs caused more noise and interference to be introduced into the cable system. If that was true, it wasn't all that big of a deal because the individual nodes were isolated and the system had a fiber backbone. Also, as of that time three years ago, if you subscribed to analog cable only, they'd give you an analog set-top box if you requested one. Don't know if thats still the case though, as I remember their supply of analog boxes was running pretty low and I'm sure they didn't mind getting rid of them just to clean out the warehouse.

I can't imagine the coax input on cable boxes would be going anywhere anytime soon... It'd cost the cable company a boatload of money to change out all their infrastructure and switch to a different delivery method. On some new buildouts though, fiber-to-the-home and IP-based delivery is becoming common.

Power outages do cause cable boxes to lose their programming, requiring a reboot in the case of the fancy digital set-tops; I had this happen more than once when I had digital cable, with a fancy-dancy Motorola digital set-top, a few years ago. Got rid of digital, later dropped expanded basic, and went back to analog when the rates went too high; I now have basic cable, no box, and no more trouble with the cable except when on those rare occasions when the headend loses the satellite signal (as sometimes happens with WGN America or the two PBS stations on my cable), or the picture freezes and the sound disappears. The latter sometimes happens during football season; I watch games with a buddy of mine, and it probably drives him nuts when the picture freezes just at a critical moment during a play. We can't hear the sound, either, as when a digital-TV picture freezes (whether the source is OTA or cable doesn't matter), the sound goes as well.

However, I have yet to hear of a cable box (digital or otherwise) being damaged by lightning although it is indeed possible and probably has happened more than once in the past. The cable operator is responsible, of course, for replacing the box if this occurs, but I'm not sure if their liability extends to the subscriber's television as well if the latter is damaged along with the box. I don't think it does. The cable company's responsibility and liability ends at the cable box; they are not permitted to do anything to the subscriber's TV and are not responsible for replacing the latter if it is damaged by anything, even faults with the cable system.

Don't call the cable company and complain about programming or those little messages (crawls) that occasionally scroll across the bottom of your screen; it will get you nowhere fast. I recently called Time-Warner to complain about weather warnings appearing at the bottom of my TV picture; the representative I spoke with told me point-blank that they cannot shut these off, as they are public service messages sent by the TV stations. The cable company has no control over these or any other aspect of the programming of any television station they carry; the cable operator's only job is to provide the signals to subscribers--the cable company is forbidden by law to do anything to the programming, including replacing the noon and nine p.m. (CST) Chicago newscasts on WGN America with some other program in markets other than metropolitan Chicago. Moreover, one of the local TV stations in Cleveland has a continuous crawl across the bottom of the screen (more news, naturally [!]) during their newscasts; the cable company cannot shut this off either, or modify it in any way. In any event, it doesn't matter to me since I don't watch that station for news anyway.

You're lucky to have a choice out there. I hear there are political reasons for keeping FiOS out of my town, and they're cahooting with the Dolans (the family dynasty that owns Cablevision) to keep us choice-free.

As for me, I'm soured on cable. Sure the picture's nice and clear, but it looks like VHS on SD channels...and don't start me on that 1997-looking interface for tha cable box...which takes 30 seconds to load the menu and at least 5 seconds just to change channels.

I'd love to cut the cord entirely when I move but we're kinda broadband-impaired here, and cable looks like my only www choice where I'd like to head, so I'm stuck with Cablevision at least for that.

Boy, what you got there is a box designed for 21" or smaller sets, and you're
tryin' to drive a 25-incher with it...

The ONLY reason we decided to go with cable again was for the internet. The first time we had cable, they ticked us off, concerning the internet, to the point where we told them to turn it all off. Then, we went with directv for about 10 months until we got tired of paying $70 a month to them. Had to pay to get out of that one; but, it was worth it. Then, we used analog OTA for about a year. Finally, we decided to give Comcast another try. Had it not been for the internet, we would be using DTV converters. We tried to get DSL from the phone company; but, they claim it's not available in my area. That only leaves dial up and comcast.

I've gone through at least six Motorola digital cable boxes since the summer of 2007. One cable repairman insisted I did not use good quality coax when I wired the house. I bought unshielded because it was all I could get locally. I replaced the main feed coming in and the line to the den with shielded coax the cable man gave me - no change. This also caused me to run a wire down the side of the house since the jack is under a window and inaccessible with the walls up.

In fact, this computer's DSL modem has been on the unshielded coax and I've never had problem one.

By the end of the year my mother and brother will be in their own house - she's buying a gutted house 300 feet down the street from mine. When they leave, we're shutting off cable TV altogether and going to DTV boxes.

How many DTV channels can you get in New Orleans? I imagine you'll put up an outside antenna.

There are eleven stations on digital plus their subchannels plus two low-power stations I rarely pick up. All the transmitters are within 5 1/2 miles of me.

Believe it or not, I erected an outdoor antenna last year after losing DTV signals during a thunderstorm. Well, I still lose DTV during heavy rain. The outdoor antenna is directional and I don't have a rotor, so I really didn't gain anything for my efforts. I'm probably going to take it down soon and use rabbit ears on the set top.

They always start by blaming your inside cable or equipment. I must have spent over a week of vacation trying to get them to get cablemodem working properly. My neighbor gave up on digital cable at that point. I finally found on the FCC site where my local provider had been cited quite a few times for cable leakage. I took a printout of that and a complaint form when I went to their main office. That finally got their attention and they sent someone out to look for cable leakage. There was a really strong emission at the end of my street. When he removed the cover from the directional coupler he received a shower of water.

That gave my cablemodem life and my neighbor was able to get digital cable.

John

I live in eastern Lake County, Ohio, 35 miles east of Cleveland--an area I call "RF never-never land" for TV and ham radio, although my FM broadcast radio reception is great (I consistently get every Cleveland station and a few out-of-market ones clear as a bell and in stereo, just as I did when I lived in the suburbs). I am about 40 miles from the transmitters of the seven Cleveland TV stations, so I am pretty much tethered to cable if I want decent reception. As it is now, the analog signal of channel 3 (the NBC affiliate in Cleveland) did not reach here at all with an antenna; five, eight and the UHF stations (five) were iffy at best, except for the CBS affiliate on channel 19. I hate to think what the situation is or may be today, with digital. If channel 3 didn't reach me in analog, and the other stations were iffy to poor at best, then I don't think OTA digital would be much better.

For Ryan (AUdubon5425): If you live literally in the shadow of every local TV station in New Orleans, you probably have much more signal than you'd ever need, so you should have good luck with DTV boxes and antennas. The only thing I'd watch would be reflections from tall buildings, if there are any such structures near your home; these obstructions used to cause ghosting with analog TV (there was an article in the [now defunct] Electronics Illustrated magazine about 45 years ago on how the construction of the then-new World Trade Center in New York could affect adversely the area's TV and FM reception because of signal relections causing ghosting and other problems) and could create areas in which the DTV signal is nonexistent, while other areas will have an extremely strong signal.

Jeff,
Update on Ch 3, From their website:
"July 12, 2009: Channel 3 moves to "all digital" broadcasting on digital channel 17 at 10 a.m. (Previously, the station was broadcasting on digital channel 2.) The station would continue its analog broadcast as the "nightlight" station in Cleveland, broadcasting only transition information through July 26th when the analog transmitter was permenantly shut off"

From the FCC site is a somewhat confusing list of TV stations and construction permits for TV stations in Cleveland.

http://www.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/tvq?state...&slon2=&size=9

You can click on the call letters to open a great wealth of information on each station... power, antenna height and pattern, projected coverage*, call sign and ownership changes... fun stuff!:yes:

*perhaps somewhat optimistic for rabbit ear users.

jr

My cable company is terrible. (Cox) Awhile back I was having issues with everything. Digital,internet,phone. Even tho I told them it was intermittant, and mainly affected when it was windy or rainy, they came out 5 times, and blamed everything on me untill the 5th call. First-off, the digital box shocked the tech, so he blamed it on my "old" TV. (a 1981 System 3) then blamed it on the VCR. Even tho I brought up a new 13" for them to hook to the box (with the same results). They treated me like crap like I was making all the problems up. It ended up being a small wire outside the house that ran from under the box outside into the basement.
They are also rude and whenever you call for ANYTHING they blame the customer and start off saying it will be a hefty charge if it's inside wire problem. I then inform them "Oh... I pay for your inside maintanence contract, so I guess you'll be right out..."

Someone over at channel three is very confused. The station never broadcast over on channel 17. All I get there is some religious station over in Canton, Ohio. Channel three was never over on channel two either. All I get over on that channel is some station called "WRLM." Channel three has been on channel three since it went on the air sixty years ago, until they ripped out their regular transmitter and started fooling with this "digital" nonsense. Now, the only way I can get the station (and every other channel over in Cleveland) is on cable. It's things like this that make me very sorry I left the Cleveland suburb I grew up in. At least there, my TV reception was half decent with an antenna, and no one needed cable.

Thank you for the link to the FCC's internet page. However, I don't think I would understand any of it -- and I can't see why I need to know any of that information anyway, even if I could understand it.

No, they are not confused over at channel 3, the FCC data shows that they HAVE used Ch 2 and are likely NOW using Ch 17 to transmit their signal. Most TV stations actually did change their transmitter frequencies to allow for the digital transition. Since stations had a long history of being identified by a certain channel number, the digital system was designed to allow "virtual channels"... a OTA digital box in Cleveland would receive the former Ch 3 on Ch 17 but would indicate it as Ch 3 on its channel list. The cable companies would also keep it on Ch 3 to avoid confusion. Believe me, and the WKYC website (and the FCC), Ch 3 does not transmit from Cleveland on ch 3 anymore.

The religious station in Canton that was on 17 is now actually transmitting on 39, but the digital boxes will report it as 17, using the transmitted PSIP Information to display 17 as a "virtual channel".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WDLI-TV

jr

I have Time-Warner cable service here in So. Ca. I was having trouble accessing the on demand service. The service rep. tried all the things he could do from the local office. I re-booted the box and he tried several tricks to restore on demand service. So we scheduled a service call. The service tech said it wasn't the box. Which I suspected. He fixed the problem at the connection going into the building. But...stll changed out the box over my objections. He replaced the heavy duty Motorola all metalbox w/clock and switched/unswitched AC plugs with a piece of crap black plastic box half the size w/ no clock and no AC outlet. Said "He had to do what the service order form requested." I missed that very accurate clock and the AC plug on the old Moto box. Called TW and said I'm on my way over to their office with the crap plastic box and want to exchange it for my old metal box. They did and all is well. I always dred the service call syndrome.

-Steve D.

I do not understand what has happened to television since last June. All I know is that the numbers on my TV dial are all mixed up for some channels since then. I get channel 25, for example, on channel 10, CBS channel 19 on channel 4, the MyNetwork affiliate on channel 43 is on channel six, and so on. The only stations that are on the right numbers anymore are 3, 5 and 8 from Cleveland. I don't know if something messed up the numbers the last time we had a thunderstorm here last summer, or what happened; all I do know is that every channel on my TV other than 3, 5 and 8 don't show up on their right numbers anymore.

This whole business about virtual channels and whatever is extremely confusing to me. As I said in my post, channel three has been on channel three as long as I can remember; the little numbers on my TV screen that show what channel my television is on always say channel 03, not 2, 17, 39, or whatever. (In fact, there is nothing on channel 39 on my cable.) As I also said, the station I do get over on channel 2 is something called "WRLM"--and that's not the NBC network channel in Cleveland. The NBC channel in Cleveland is on channel three and has been since the mid-1950s. I don't know where you get the idea it was, is, whatever, on channel 17, but as I said, the only thing I get over on 17 on my cable is a religious station over in Canton, Ohio.

Oh, if only I could go back to the 1960s, when all we had in Cleveland on television was channels 3, 5 and eight. In the suburb where I grew up, we got those three channels, on their right numbers, just fine. It opened up a can of worms when educational channel 25 went on the air in Cleveland in 1965, as that station's signal just wasn't powerful enough to reach our area.

As far as the cable system here, 5 is CBS, 6 is ABC, and 7 is NBC. It's been that way for 30+ years, as long as there's been cable service here.

As far as OTA, virtual channel 11 is actually broadcasting on RF channel 11. Before the digital switch, the digital RF channel was on, IIRC, 49. When they shut down the analog transmitter, they shut off channel 49 and moved back down to VHF channel 11.

I think virtual 24 is on RF 24

Virtual 30 is actually on RF 31

Virtual 14 (PBS) is on, IIRC, RF 44.

Our CW affiliate, which is OTA 11.2, is on channel 8 on the cable. The affiliate actually goes by "Meridian's CW 8"

Jeff,
It is all about "branding". Ch 3 has been known and recognized by that "brand name" for many years, and even though they don't transmit on that frequency any more, they have kept that identifier as their "brand name". The cable company has also chosen to continue to distribute the channel on Ch 3, so that is where it shows up on your set. The illusion is complete.
Since you are a ham, you likely know that one does not "mess with" the FCC... here is a link to the info on the FCC website, showing the former Ch 3 using Ch 2 and Ch 17.

http://www.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/tvq?list=0&facid=73195

http://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws....ion_id=1314700

hope this helps,
jr