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I'd mentioned about modulating a satellite channel onto our OTA setup here in another thread and Fred555 asked if I could start a thread on it, so here goes. It's pretty simple, in the way I did it. The reason why I did it is to share a few satellite channels with my parents who live in our house next door to mine. They also share our OTA antenna, through 465' of coax. They're are in their late 80's and my Dad needs simple, easy to use, he gets confused pretty easily these days.

A little history of the progression of the setup here first that led me into this. Some details mightn't be completely spot on because I'm going back years here! My memory isn't what it used to be.

It started out with cable TV being too expensive for my parents and them shutting it off, then my Dad going nuts with no TV.

We had a old OTA antenna here on my house that wasn't being used because we had cable. Tried it at my parent's house down the hill from us, horrible reception, at our house, pretty good. Set it up at our house and for about five or six years I'd used a computer on a separate dedicated network left on 24/7 running windows media encoder here at my house to stream OTA TV from it to my parents house and I'd written a small program that my parents could use at their house to switch the TV channels with on their computer through the network. This was via Wi-Fi with DD-WRT firmware installed on two routers, one here and one at my parents house bridged together. I had Linux on a original XBox at their house to output the TV channels onto their TV. After a year or so, installed XBMC and I got rid of the channel change program on their computer and made it so a channel line up was right within XBMC and they could change channels with the X Box remote, just turn on the XBox, select channel, watch TV, it was easier and nicer looking than what I had setup before.

Played around with MythTV a bit, but it just wasn't reliable enough, in the sense that it needed more fiddling with constantly than what I wanted to do. I didn't want the TV down while I fixed/updated things.

Started playing around with windows media center and switched over to that, worked pretty good, still using the same bridged routers with DD-WRT, but instead of using WME, WMC, although I think I still had to encode it differently, don't remember for sure. When the 360 came out it replaced the original XBox because ms didn't no longer support the original as a extender and no HD capability over network.

Put up a new, big, OTA antenna and used that with the same system, more channels.

Around the time of Vista, media center began to annoy me. Up until then it was good, in Vista there was a very annoying time/date issue that I fixed myself because ms. just was taking too long, other things. ATSC didn't play nice with Vista and was a big pita, 7 was much better. When ms sent me 8 to check out, I could see where media center was headed and dumped media center all together, dug a trench, laid pipe and ran coax cable direct to my parents house.

Had gotten into FTA and setup a few dishes and we were debating about getting rid of our cable here, so we used just our OTA and FTA for TV for a month as a test, none of us here missed the cable, so we cancelled it. My Dad was up our house one day and really liked Velocity on 121W, so this is where the modulating sat channels came in.

Real easy, bought two of these. They come in single, dual, triple and quad channel models. One I bought used and I had to fix it, which I wouldn't recommend anyone trying, send back a defective one, the shielding on the board will not come off with just a regular soldering iron or cheap soldering station. I had a hard time with my hot air station and de-soldering station.

Amazon product ASIN B000246TJU
and I used these to connect to the OTA line before it enters into my distribution amp, regular splitters and combiners did not work for me, these did:

Amazon product ASIN B00006JPEA
There's a few caveats with them. The modulators output SD, very good SD, but SD nonetheless, and the splitters must cause some loss, although I don't notice any here. These modulators are programmable through a few buttons on the front, so whatever is input to them can be modulated onto a UHF channel 14-64, it can be a issue trying to find a clear channel! CATV channels 65-125 (excluding 95-99) too, but I haven't tried the modulators with a cable system, so I don't know how well that works.

We have Velocity modulated onto channel 55 off of our X2, our downstairs sat receiver modulated onto 64 and our surveillance DVR modulated onto channel 16. Occasionally I throw a channel up here and there for my parents when something they like is going to be on, like a whole special weekend of one show playing.

Right now I have been working on setting up a system for a remote control that will work over the coax or through a wireless link so my parents can tune to a modulated channel that shows the output of a satellite receiver and they can use it at their house with a remote control as if the receiver was right there. Similar to what I do here with the RF extender, we can carry the sat receiver remote into any room of our house and use it as if we were right in front of the sat receiver, just tune the TV to channel 64.

I was initially going to setup one of my C band and a Ku dish closer to my parents house and just run a cable with a receiver down there, but this will be much easier and if there's a problem, I can just walk into the other room and check out what's going on, some days my legs don't work all that well and I wouldn't be able to easily make it down to their house.