cable headend question

[truckracer]

I didn't know where to post this - possible the cable forum but I figured everyone here would have more knowledge and understanding for this one.

When HITS offers bouquets of channels on various transponders for small cable companies, Do the small cable companies just pass the IF frequency from the lnb's of their dishes down their lines to customers' homes and use motorola digicipher 2 boxes to decode the channels with maybe some analog mixed in along for the "non-digital" subscribers?

I guess the motorola access control center in Atlanta does all the authorizations for all the digital cable boxes via satellite.

Or do they convert the IF signals (re-modulate them) to something else?

I was just curious about the technical side of a headend.

 

[tvropro]

This should shed some light on your questions

 

[truckracer]

Yes - great document. Even for a small cable company, those transcoders look expensive.

 

[megahurtz]

We used to bring all services down to baseband video / audio, then insert them on the wanted channel using a modulator. We did pay service encoding during the modulation process. That was 20+ years ago, so I imagine things have changed somewhat

 

[truckracer]

headend

I got to see an old headend one time a few years ago that was all analog.
They had a couple of racks of videocipher II receivers going into modulators like you described above. Nothing digital there. the locals were brought in from the antenna farm and just mixed into the line on their same frequencies.
No remodulation of the locals - just passed along and boosted.

 

[Mr Tony]

When HITS offers bouquets of channels on various transponders for small cable companies, Do the small cable companies just pass the IF frequency from the lnb's of their dishes down their lines to customers' homes and use motorola digicipher 2 boxes to decode the channels with maybe some analog mixed in along for the "non-digital" subscribers?

The X4 stuff most cable companies put a FTA dish in the yard and hook up the box. The analog stuff from the cable company comes into the box and gives them a guide and the digital stuff comes from satellite

There is a cable company near our cabin (small cable company) and thats how they do it

 

[truckracer]

So basically they are a "satellite provider" and the cable plant just provides the guide, locals, analog cable channels where the dish provides the digital stuff. Pretty clever. Wonder what the cable rates are for various companies that offered Hits2Home?

 

[tvropro]

The X4 stuff most cable companies put a FTA dish in the yard and hook up the box. The analog stuff from the cable company comes into the box and gives them a guide and the digital stuff comes from satellite

There is a cable company near our cabin (small cable company) and thats how they do it

That was Hits2Home. Now with X4 going away there going to have to put up a dish at the headend on AMC 18, set it up like the manual I posted earlier and send it to STB's. What's probably going to happen is there going to change all the analog to digital and do CompressOVision with the limited bandwidth they have.

 

[tvropro]

I got to see an old headend one time a few years ago that was all analog.
They had a couple of racks of videocipher II receivers going into modulators like you described above. Nothing digital there. the locals were brought in from the antenna farm and just mixed into the line on their same frequencies.
No remodulation of the locals - just passed along and boosted.

I've seen the old headends too. Like to see the new digital setups. Probably just different pieces of equipment in the same racks with new wireing.

I have a mini SMATV headend in my my home. I take my OTA channels and using modulators feed my 4DTV and 2700 into the master ant system for distribution to just about every room. I'll be adding an ATSC tuner & modulator to the system very soon for digital OTA for the analog tv's.

 

[Corrado]

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.

 

[badhat]

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.

 

[Mr Tony]

some cool info there badhat

 

[truckracer]

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!

 

[tvropro]

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

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.