What About Cable ?

You have Cable-TV and are wondering how does the demise of analog TV affect your cable signal? You and me both. We assume the cable companies have some type of plan in place in order to receive the local channels once the analog goes away. Normally this is accomplished by an off-air air receiver located in their head-end(main cable office). This signal is then sent to you via their cable system to your home. Many cable companies use Fiber optic transmissions directly from the station. This provides a cleaner, sharper image. Cable companies have two choices. They can purchase a digital receiver and convert it back to analog or they can provide customers a set top receiver and provide you with a digital feed. Whatever they choose you are protected until 2012. The FCC ruled on September 13th that they must provide their customers the current analog signal until 2012. At that time they can convert their system to digital and pull the analog. So right now you can keep you analog TV hooked to cable until 2012.

So what about HDTV on cable right now? In many cable TV markets cable companies are providing local HDTV signals to their cable customers at no additional cost. You can thank broadcasters for that. If you have a digital TV with a QAM tuner, you should be able to receive these signals. You should check with your local cable company as to the availability of the HDTV signals. Wait you say, what is a QAM tuner? Well most newer digital sets have this feature built into their tuners. By the way QAM stands for Quadrature amplitude modulation. I know what you are thinking. What is that. If you want to read about it go to this site. The simple explanation is it is like having a digital tuner for cable. It recognizes the HD channels so you can watch them on your digital TV.