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D_E_Bishop's avatar
D_E_Bishop
Explorer
Oct 01, 2014

Cable Co's going all digital using QAM system

Both of our cable companies have or are going all digital and it requires a QAM tuner to decode the signals. There are others that are using the QAM system too. If this is common will we have to buy External QAM tuners for our sets that don't have them built in for CGs that utilize cable?

Seems to be that the Cable Co's picked the one system not required by the FCC. Or maybe it's the FUC, whatever. It just seems that I replace all the CRT sets to have the new digital tuners for OTA signal and now for wired I have to have a box for those sets without QAM. Of course none of this is to increase profit for the Cable providers is it.
  • Head end unit, combiner, amplifier, decoder boxes etc. cost around $20,000 for a +/- 20 channel setup. Then figure on around $500 a channel for each additional channel. That is on top of whatever the cable company is going to charge to provide the programming per site. For small to mid size parks, that is the equivalent of losing a entire year's profit all to offer fewer channels than they did before the conversion. I think you are going to see a number of parks make the decision to drop cable rather than make that size investment. Can't say I would blame them.
  • Campgrounds will still have the option to decode the digital cable signals at the in-house distribution system before feeding them to the individual sites, usually in analog NTSC format. The equipment may not be cheap though, depending on what kind of deals the cable companies offer their commercial subscribers.
  • Although needing a cable box is a pain the butt, the picture quality is far superior. The campground where I winter has a box for each site that you can get from the office but if you need more than one you must go to the cable co. to sign them out. There is no cost but you must show a credit card so you don't forget to return it.

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