View Single Post
  #3   Report Post  
Old August 20th 03, 10:37 PM
Dave Platt
 
Posts: n/a
Default

I would like to have something plug into my cable tv jack that can
transmit the cable over to another antenna that is plugged into the
VHF input on the VCR in another room. That way I would not have to
run cable from the cable jack in my bedroom to the home theater system
in the living room.

Does anyone know of any items that would allow this? I think I need a
tranmitter and a reciever, but I do not want to change channels at the
transmitter - I want to be able to change with the reciever (plugged
into the VCR).

Any ideas??


Transmitting the whole content of the cable-TV feed is simply not
going to be possible for you to do. You're talking about a massive
amount of bandwidth / frequency spectrum - each station is about 6 MHz
wide.

You cannot simply hook the cable up to an antenna and "beam" the RF in
the next room. Well, you can, but it'd be quite illegal. Many cable
channels use frequencies which are _not_ authorized for
broadcasting... they overlap the amateur 2-meter band, aircraft and
public-safety frequencies, etc. Cable-TV companies have to go to some
lengths to keep these signals _inside_ the cable system and keep them
from leaking out into free space.

Although it's not what you want to do, the best you're going to be
able to manage is probably something like a remote-controllable tuner
at the cable-TV jack (think "An old VCR from the thrift store, which
has a working tuner and a busted tape mechanism, costing all of $10
as-is") which has a composite-video output, plugged into one of those
little 2.4 GHz Part 15 video transmitters. The 2.4 GHz video
receiver's composite video (and audio) outputs would be plugged into
your VCR's A/V inputs.

You're likely to find the picture quality, and reliability of this
arrangement to be less good than you'd like. I used to use something
like it to remote-view a TiVo system, and soon decided to switch over
to a wired-in arrangement.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Hosting the Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!