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here's the deal

Posted by Joe Murphy Jr (A) on October 10, 2011 at 20:51:45

In Reply to: RE: need a cable box expert posted by DavidLD on October 10, 2011 at 15:43:43:

The cable company does not scramble "free" digital channels (those which are broadcast OTA which, by the way, I believe would be a violation of FCC regulations), even 5 HD channels. I think the rule is that they can choose to not offer them, but they can't offer them as scrambled channels. If I'm misunderstanding something, someone please correct me!

I do not want to pay the cable company an extra fee -- which would be close to $15 a month -- for using two of their cable boxes (two of the displays I have are monitors, not televisions) to tune in the channels. I have two HD tuners that do NTSC/QAM/ATSC, but there is a component or components on the motherboards that are acting up (pick a channel, leave it there, no problem -- start changing channels, both tuners turn themselves off and can't be used for a few hours). They've worked fine for the last 2 1/2 years, but now they are practically toast because the motherboard is no longer made and the seller/manufacturer can't repair them -- probably a chip that has gone bad.

The tuner market for NTSC/QAM set top boxes is a scam. The prices are total bullshit and the products with a decent price are mostly crap. Some say they offer QAM tuning, but can't tune to QAM channels. Others tune to QAM channels, but not all of them or only the SD QAM channels, despite the fact that they are advertised as HD tuners. In order to get an NTSC/QAM tuner that really works, you have to spend about $200. What a crock of shit!

There are people selling cable boxes for around $70. The problem is that in order to use them, the cable company wants to charge me to use something that isn't theirs, as a signal needs to be sent to the cable box in order for them to allow the box to work (if a box is addressable, it has to talk to the cable company in order to work). If I can disconnect or bypass that part of a cable box that I buy, it will act like a normal tuner for the signals that the cable company sends down the pipe unscrambled.

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