Old-school analog cable TV setup - Tour & Update

A quick update on the madness.

0:00 Introduction
1:49 The Channels on an old TV
5:13 A spreadsheet!
9:02 The Hardware
17:49 The Channels on a new(er) TV

[shmehfleh]

If you had a TV that could still tune above channel 69, (nice!) you could use it to eavesdrop on cellular calls, right up until the analog cell network was finally shut down.

[rpelzer]

As a Detroiter, the Global TV links make me smile, as we used to watch Bob McAdorey (The McAdorey Report) on Global News regularly in the olden days...

[gwesco]

I worked for a Catholic hospital for 32 years. At one time before we had cable, around 1975, I built a 16 channel "cable" system that brought in all of the vhf, uhf, and a couple of satellite channels. We also had an in-house education channel and a religious channel as well. I used commercial modulators and down convertors. I used the cable channels and everything was adjacent channel so you had to balance outputs closely. I even built a controller for the VCR's for the education channel that ran them on a regular schedule and between programs displayed informational text similar to what you showed. Eventually it was replaced by commercial cable sometime in the late 2000's after I retired.

[therealcojo]

I'm a cable technician, I think what you've done here is really cool. I have a lot of experience with those modulators, they were used mostly for injecting security camera feeds, or for distributed video in bars and such.
But the problem with a lot of them is that they are very noisy and they bleed over into adjacent channels, they also output at very high decibel levels which exacerbates that bleed, you should try and equalize the output levels on your modulators, see if reducing the gain helps, if the outputs are lower, you'll have less problems with noise and you may be able to get more channels packed together, then you can amplify the equalized signal into your distribution.
We have the same problems you do with noise on the cable plant, disconnect unused outlets and terminate them if you want to reduce noise further.
It's too bad you don't have access to a cable meter, I am pretty sure you could use a software defined radio.
Also the full map of what is where on the frequency spectrum is available from the crtc.
Let me know if you have any questions I'd be happy to help!

[thesavo]

Update: I just opened a a box of 10 Blonder Tongue MCIM-D modulators from ebay, that I bought immediately after watching this video . Thanks for the tip of using PC/CD audio jumper wires for power, @11:22.

[KanawhaCountyWX]

You're tempting me more and more to make a set up kind of like this once we move to the new house.

[charlie_nolan]

The LTE filter could be more than a novelty, a lot of receivers are subject to frontend overload, meaning that a strong signal can obscure a weak signal even on a different frequency. So, if you are near a cell tower it could impede reception of TV channels. This is an awesome setup, and I'd like to do something like this in the future.

[anidnmeno]

"cable ready" thats a phrase i haven't heard in years

[voiceofjeff]

Tou said you're having a blast with this. Thats all that matters.
Hope you're still enjoying it.

[JoshKeenan]

Love this! I am an aging millennial who has been hit HARD with the 90s nostalgia stick and have numerous CRTs around the house. I was looking for something exactly like this and I'm so glad I came across you! I used to have a TV-guide type setup using an old XBMC plugin called "pseudoTV" that I might dig around and try to get a channel running. Thanks! Definitely subscribing!

[willvolovich]

This is so cool. Your dedication is unreal.

[Roger-rs]

Boy you really want the wayback machine! Holy Moly the processing, and cabling complexity in order to get a simulation of old analog cable TV is off the chain!

[betamaxuser]

To minimize interference and signal loss, ensure you are using RG-6 coaxial cable for your internal TV system and not RG-59.  RG-6 and RG-59 are both types of coaxial cable that can be used with analog television, but RG-6 is thicker and has better shielding, so it is far less susceptible to inteference from over-the-air signals.  Reportedly, RG-6 is also better at carrying the high-frequency signals for UHF channels.

Back in the 1990s, when I used RG-59 cable, I could still see ghosted images of off-air TV channels superimposed on cable channels with the same frequency, but when I switched to RG-6, the ghosting disappeared.  RG-6 may also help block out interference from power supplies and modern wireless communication.

Interestingly, when I was a teenager, I had a TV in my bedroom but no cable.  One day, while the rest of the family was out, I connected a long extension cable from my bedroom TV and VCR down to the cable that had been feeding the family TV.  Because I did not have a sufficiently long length of coaxial cable, I used _audio_ cable with coaxial connection adaptors.

The audio cable _was_ able to carry TV signals, but the higher and higher I tuned, the weaker the signals became.  By around cable channel 65 (equivalent to UHF channel 14), the picture was extremely fuzzy.

[PercyPanleo]

10:11 The Zero does actually have composite output, it's just that it doesn't have a port so you have to solder wires to the board to get it.

[logan.]

Golden girls is my favorite show, I love that you have a dedicated station for it

[Advokitt]

I want to do this so terribly bad. I’m an electrician by trade with an extensive computers background and I STILL feel lost. Glad to have found your channel, I’ve been playing with this idea for about 10 years.

[voltvids]

Wow and I thought I was the only one that did this. My setup runs channel 2, 4MTS stereo, 5, 7, 9, 12 MTS stereoCATV 27 and 47. Im only running 2 raspberry pi for canned content, plus 2 ATSC boxes for a few stations that require a seperate antenna for a different direction. Then my cable boxes on 2 of them set to channels I watch regularly. All mixed in to the digital feed from antenna. All my modulators are either BT or Wavecom commercial except my channel 4 MTS stereo which is a Radio shack model that they sold briefly about 35 years ago. I have a series of distribution amplifiers and RF pads to balance the levels. The advantage to the commercial modulators is they have adjustable RF outout which makes balancing the levels a breeze. Mine has been running about 15 years now. Even since the transition to DTV. My Pi is also the first gen running Kodi just to stream videos. One is on a 5 disk DVD player that is loaded with a bunch of disks in rotation

[bobroberts]

Going back a bit farther in CATV land, the early community channels used a fixed B&W camera that looked at a merry go round setup where printed paper was placed on the outside of the merry go round. There was some sort of timer / mechanical linkage that would pause the paper long enough to be read. .

[eaglevision]

Back between the mid 90s/2000s I (a satellite TV enthusiast since age 13 located in Germany) built a headend to add 22 channels to our standard cable lineup. I added the channels in UHF, the headend was a mix of a commercial headend and receivers with decoders (Eurocrypt/D2Mac, Videocrypt) and RF modulators. The channels were satellite channels from different satellites and most were pay TV the cable company did not even offer or were not available in my country (Germany) for regular subscription.
Needless to say, some neighbors were soon interested in a cable hookup, for a short time I became a cable company! The headend was in my parents garage with lots of dished on top of the flat roof.
I still wonder that I never got in trouble because the channels must have backfed into the regular cable system since I did not use any filters when combining the 2 systems. But maybe my amplifiers were not strong enough to go very far in the grid.
Also how much electricity it consumed, but it must be a lot with all the receivers, decoders, Secam/Pal converters, amplifiers etc.

[tall_dude]

This showed up in my recommended videos to watch. Firstly, I haven't seen the name "Baycrest" since I was a kid. My parents had a Baycrest TV that was made in 1979, I think it was in our family until 2000. That's alot of equipment to run that setup!