FM signals carried by cable operators

[bouchecl]

Hi,

I a newbie in this field, so please do not flame me if has been discussed to death.

I'm buying a PVR250 (retail) and I plan to set up a box in my home as an experimental PVR with GB-PVR. Now, in phase I of my plan, I will hook up my coax to the Hauppauge card. Up here in Canada, cable operators carry 30 FM signals in the 88-108 MHz range (cable 95, 96 and 97).

So here is the question: without resorting to a specialized FM tuner, would it be possible to hack the registry to tune in to those frequencies, using FreqCopy or otherwise?

Thanks in advance

Claude

[sub]

The PVR250 retail device does not contain an FM tuner. So, no.

[hitek146]

The audio portion of a TV tuner is an FM demodulator, so if you set the frequency right, you should hear a radio station. Most TV tuners are not able to fine tune to exactly the frequency of the broadcast audio, though, as they will not tune specifically enough. You might get a station that ends in .5MHz.... NTSC transmissions set the audio carrier 4MHz above the video carrier, so if you wanted to tune in 99.5MHz, you could try setting your tuner frequency to 95.5MHz, and you should get audio from 99.5MHz, for example. It does work with some TV software, although I haven't tried it with GB-PVR. It's worth a try....

Hitek

[jquinlan]

Make sure it standard FM signals that they carry. Some cable companies like the one in my town, Time Warner, only carries digital music channels that can only be decoded by their boxes because they have album information and artwork coded for its use only. Even though some of the digital music channels they advertise are over-the-air stations.

[bouchecl]

jquinlan: The 30 stations I'm talking about are real FM stations carried on analog cable. Right now, I can split my cable input to a 75-300 ohm converter, plug it in the antenna in of a radio tuner and tune in to one of 32 stations available between 88.5 MHz and 107.7 MHz.

My cable provider also provides 45 digital channels in a QAM, and obviously these channels are only available through my Scientific Atlanta STB.

Hitek146: that was my thinking too. When I saw what the Dutch users of GB-PVR did with their PVR-250s and FreqCopy to cope with their non-standard cable systems, I started thinking about tweaking the registry to fine tune to the FM frequencies. I can't wait to get my hands on my new card (it shipped today... )to give it a try.

[hitek146]

I don't think you should even have to tweak the registry, if the TV software will let you fine-tune the frequency. You could then just add a manual channel, setting it's frequency to that of your choice, and save the channel....

Hitek

Also, if it helps, the cable TV channels in the US that cover the FM radio band are those in the high 90's... 95, 96, 97, etc.....