New Cable TV converter protocol

[Daytonaman]

Recent travels to CG that have cable tv service, finding it is necessary to use their converter common to the local cable co in order to get any reception. This requires an interconnection in the coach, and a channel scan on all tv's. Any solutions other than:"I have Sat so it doesn't matter" or "we use FTA TV", would be helful as not all areas have encoded cable.

[wildtoad]

I'm not sure its fair to blame the KOA for a situation the cable company created. The cable systems are moving to a setup where everyone will need a box of some sort to receive anything. The best a CG can do is to provide a bunch of loaner boxes and hope they get them back. Recently my golf course which had about 10 TV's being driven by basic cable had to get 10 boxes from the provider just to continue to get the golf channel. PIA to say the least. They didn't work real well so they switched to sat which of course resulted in 10 different boxes.

I hope at some point we can buy "Cable Ready" TV's once again where the conversion is done in the TV.

[Dutch_12078]

I've only run into the proprietary converter issue a couple of times so far, but when I was wiring up the sat system in our then new to us Landau, I added two short lengths of coax connected with a double 'F' connector to the TV RF feed, with the connector "loop" available in an overhead cabinet near the OTA antenna power injector and switch. There was already a 110v outlet in the cabinet for DVR power, etc, so now hooking up a converter is a simple 5 minute job.

[DSDP_Don]

We ran into this for the first time at a KOA on the Oregon coast. It was a very wooded campground on a hillside where OTA and sat were not going to work.

They provided us with a baggie that contained a cable box, remote and a short piece of coax. To make the system work, you needed at least two 25' lengths of coax which they sold in the store. I carry extra coax and connections and after about 30 minutes of assembling the box, cables and routing it through a window, I got it to work.

This was really an archaic system and probably a cheap fix when the world went digital, not a new system of cable operation. We find most KOA's are nice and a few are terrible. This was probably the worse KOA we've visited. The owners were pleasant, but the park was old, the roads were narrow the sites were small. The exit out of the park at the end of their main loop was such a tight turn, uphill, that they didn't allow it and made you circle the park and come in against the entering traffic.