Social Feed

Interesting information. I was thinking about this topic just last week while driving by a cable TV satellite dish farm. I was trying to figure out a way that they might engineer all those C band dishes and signals. Then my thought turned to thinking about what the job would be like to keep all those dishes and related equipment running.

Our hits2home package was $49.99/mo. Well I can't say was because they still have customers on it. They just aren't taking orders anymore. Our headend has been mostly digital for quite a long time. As a matter of factly we take those digital signals and send them out analog... all 56 channels worth. We use modulators to turn the different programming into channels. Commercials are queued by a tone that is sent by the broadcaster to start them. The tv guide information comes in over channel 7 PBS here for our digital boxes. The tv guide information that is put on a guide channel is a service that is paid for by the cable provider. Something else that's noteworthy for the curious. An analog channel takes up a whole channel space while you can cram up to 12 digital channels in the same space. And HD we can only fit 2 channels in a single channel space... very bandwidth intensive. The overall maintenance of a cable dish farm and headend is actually pretty easy. Since I have worked here we have never had a failure on the dish side but we have had several receivers die. I think the hardest thing we have to cope with is adding channels. Especially when it's on a completely different bird than any of our dishes are pointing at. Well anyway our headend is definitely not state of the art by any means.. as we are a small company. But I heard Comcast headends are the single baddest azz setups that you could ever lay your eyes on. Ok enough of my rambling.

some cool info there badhat

Thanks for the info, We have always had satellite tv and never really subbed to cable except for a short time when we bought a new house and the dish was not up yet.

Most people never realize what it takes to "make cable". All they know is flip the channel and it's there!. Kind of like heating and A/C - Just flip the thermostat and your comfortable. Not realizing what has to happen to make it all work.

I can imagine with the kind of money comcast has that their headend is state of the art.

I would love to have an 8vsb or QAM modulator to send my HD from my 4dtv and pansat 9200 HD all over the house to the digital tuners in my HD tv's over one coax (instead of 5 coaxes with componet amps daiseychained all over the place!) One coax, signal amp, splitters-would be too easy if the copyright nazi's (hdcp)BS would allow the modulator to be sold to individuals at an affordable price.

With componet distribution, my media cabinets look like something at Nasa!

badhat said:

But I heard Comcast headends are the single baddest azz setups that you could ever lay your eyes on.

Click to expand...

That's funny... My local cable company, Comcast used to be owned by TCI when I saw it. It was a joke. They had 3 dishes, 2 racks of receivers and an old 19" Sony tv with a cable box hooked to it for a monitor. Didn't seem state of the art to me.