You have your TV cable running into your house. Monarch cable has all sorts of TV signals on that same cable. I’m sure they must boost the signal as it gets further from their transmission center.
Now say you hook your VCR up backwards to the cable line. It is now modulating its input and broadcasting it on channel 3/4. A very weak signal, but it is. Imagine one were to change that signal to a different channel, something unused higher up. Then you put one of those cheapy radio shack boosters on it.
I bet you could have your own cable TV station with range determined by the strength of your booster, and where Monarch’s boosters sat in relation to you. If you lived near the distribution center, and managed to get your signal fed behind one of their boosters, you’d have your own public access channel for Prince Rupert.
Disclaimer: I’m not gonna do this, it’s just a thought.
There are lots of reasons why it’s pretty much pointless, but I’ll limit my responses to the items I have a good grasp of.
If you transmit on a channel already used by the cable company, and use a crappy home built transmitter, you only cause ghost images on the channel you’re aiming at, and in addition, you’ll bleed you signal into other channels.
According to my extremely reliable source in the Cable industry, people complain when weird things happen. A complete outage of signal would yield very few, if any service requests, while poor signal causes many. Your pirate signal causes instant complaints, and you wouldn’t be hard to track down.
The signal amplifiers (those ominous gray boxes scattered around town on the poles) only work in one direction. Depending on where you’re located, you may get amplified in one direction, but completely stopped in another, essentially limiting your signal to your neighborhood. Also, you’re crappy signal just makes a mess of things if you get amplified, and thus quickly shutdown.
If you transmit on unused channels, chances are you get shutdown by the organization that owns that frequency. For example, transmit on channel 42 or 43, and you get Transport Canada busting your door down. The cable company doesn’t use particular channels for a reason.
All of that has been considered in my original post.
a) You’d need to transmit on an unused frequency most importantly
b) Your signal would only go as far as you could transmit
c) A city wide transmission could be possible if you got behind the right cable compay boosters. I didn’t mention that they are of course only one way, making it impossible “to piss upstream”. But if you took a dump in the creek at the top of the mountain, everyone would be tasting your water.
You’d use your VCR to modulate the signal, boost it to get it to a cable company booster, and then it would take care of the rest.
A 6m linear amp apparently does a nice job of getting a signal a long way through the airwaves.
Want to try a pirate TV station? I can get you some 10w transmitters and broadcast antennas cheap, we’ve got surplus equipment around.
We do 10 licensed VHF & 12 UHF here, and I’ve been assigned the job to unload some VHFs from a redundant site.
[quote=“rangerwreck”]a) You’d need to transmit on an unused frequency most importantly
b) Your signal would only go as far as you could transmit
c) A city wide transmission could be possible if you got behind the right cable compay boosters. I didn’t mention that they are of course only one way, making it impossible “to piss upstream”. But if you took a dump in the creek at the top of the mountain, everyone would be tasting your water.
You’d use your VCR to modulate the signal, boost it to get it to a cable company booster, and then it would take care of the rest.[/quote]
When your signal hits an amp, things get good and messy. To make it clean, it involves knowledge of the equipment owned by the cable company. Things like cable type, diameter, distance, amplitude modulation of each channel, etc. When I asked the question, it took 20 minutes to have everything explained. They don’t just transmit the signal, there’s a lot of math involved.
It would be easier to broadcast through the air, but your “viewersâ€
[quote=“herbie_popnecker”]Want to try a pirate TV station? I can get you some 10w transmitters and broadcast antennas cheap, we’ve got surplus equipment around.
We do 10 licensed VHF & 12 UHF here, and I’ve been assigned the job to unload some VHFs from a redundant site.[/quote]
If you really mean it, yes, haha. Free RF equipment is tasty.
Gotcha, that makes a lot of sense. Sounds like one would need professional equipment, and a professional to tune it.
If you really mean it, yes, haha. Free RF equipment is tasty…[/quote]
Can’t do free, but might be able to doo $x.xx a pound or something if you pick it up…
IF you do 10w it will blast thru cable shielding for a couple blocks… messy though. And UHF over the air won’t show on cable, they change the frequency. MOF they squeeze some channels into ch7 -8 VHF gap. I lived in Vancouver and doctor’s pages would announce on channel 17, the cable guy discovered a crack in the cable shielding outside and the pager transmitter across the street…
Time your pr0n broadcast to overpower the Sunday morning sermons… hee hee
