pirate tv

[Phreakazoid]

ok so i was looking through some old text files then did a search on the forum about pirate tv stations and i was thinking about possibly making a "snow box" or just setting up a pirate tv station and was wondering if anyone else here has done it

[MoeThirteen]

I was thinking now that most of the TV stations have gone digital how long would it take for someone to see how long you can have your own tv station. GO FOR THE GOLD!!!

[Nod]

I do believe those frequencies will now be PD/FD. Not so sure it would be a good idea to mess with those.

[Magus]

I do believe those frequencies will now be PD/FD. Not so sure it would be a good idea to mess with those.

If that's true, then that means it would be possible to listen to police scanners using your television? Neato.

[immabadspellor_]

We had one at university that covered all of campus easy, plus about a mile radius.  It was a ham 70cm ATV transmitter running around 50 watts.  This worked on the principal that at the time none of the residence halls had cable except for a TV room and all of the over the air TV stations are VHF.  Most TV's you buy are set to cable by default and if you had an antenna you would have to go into the menu and tell it such.  However, cable channels 2-13 are the same as VHF channels 2-13 so no one ever bothered to change it from CATV to antenna.  The ham 70cm ATV channels map exactly to channels 58, 59, 60 on a cable TV, so we had channel 60.  Of course, people only found out about it by word of mouth.  All the residence halls had a hall pay phone on each floor that could receive calls so calls were made to all of them to tell people about it.  The station ran movies at night as well as some home made content usually involving booze or residence hall rivalry.  Good times.

[Godot]

I have a question for you all that I have always wondered about. What if you hooked the output of a TV RF modulator to a cable TV line, and set it to an unused channel? Based on my understanding of the cable TV network, I think it should go into the network, and be distributed to other TVs. Of course, it would probably only go as far as the nearest amplifier, but you may be able to broadcast to neighbors, especially in an apartment or dormitory setting.

Of course, it is probably not a good idea. They may be using the frequencies for Internet access or digital TV services, and you can probably get in trouble for doing this. But would it work?

[rbcp]

I have a question for you all that I have always wondered about. What if you hooked the output of a TV RF modulator to a cable TV line, and set it to an unused channel? Based on my understanding of the cable TV

How would you pick a channel other than 3 or 4?  All the RF modulators I've seen are limited to just those 2 channels.

[thefinn93]

I've seen some that can go to other channels. One could be set awaywhere between like 2/3 and 99.

[Godot]

I have one somewhere that does broadcast channels 14 to 69 and cable channels 65 to 125 except for 96 to 99. Actually, I think I am going to go try to find that now.

[Godot]

I tried hooking my RF modulator to an upstairs cable jack and used a mini camera for the video source. I watched for my video on my TV downstairs. I tried four different unused channels, and got nothing but slight changes in the white noise.

One thing I noticed is that most of my unused channels have a mostly dark picture, unlike the even mix of black and white I get with the cable disconnected. I think I may be competing with signals that are not analog TV but still used for something. According to my cable modem status page, it is using a downstream frequency right in an unused cable TV channel frequency. I want to hook up some form of spectrum analyzer so I can make sure these channels are really not in use. I may try just hooking up a ham radio HT and checking the signals strengths.

I also might try disconnecting my cable TV line at the splitter and trying again, just to see.

--

I have been looking for more info on this, and apparently, unused cable channels are used in this way quite a bit, usually for video surveillance systems. Typically a filter is used to prevent digital video or Internet users on the frequency from interfering with the signal and vice versa. If you go without that filter on a truly unused channel, you could broadcast to neighbors and get yelled at by the cable company.

The best post I found on this is: http://forums.snapstream.com/vb/off-topic/43277-channel-modulator.html#post276172

I could definitely see someone running a pirate station like this in a college dormitory. (Although I'm not suggesting anyone do it.)

[immabadspellor_]

I do believe those frequencies will now be PD/FD. Not so sure it would be a good idea to mess with those.

If that's true, then that means it would be possible to listen to police scanners using your television? Neato.

Only channels 52-69 were reallocated, the frequencies used by channels 2-51 are still TV... for now. 
Your analog TV will not make a great receiver for the new users of these frequencies as TV audio was very wide FM.  The analog users of these frequencies will be using narrowband FM so you may hear some very weak and quiet audio, and this would only be moderately worthwhile if you have a set old enough to where you can turn the AFC off and use manual fine tuning.  I used to do this when there were still analog cellular phones as you could use an old set that still had channels 70-83 to listen to them, but cell phones were narrow FM compared to TV audio so the same problem occurred. 

I tried hooking my RF modulator to an upstairs cable jack and used a mini camera for the video source. I watched for my video on my TV downstairs. I tried four different unused channels, and got nothing but slight changes in the white noise.

One thing I noticed is that most of my unused channels have a mostly dark picture, unlike the even mix of black and white I get with the cable disconnected. I think I may be competing with signals that are not analog TV but still used for something. (snip)

I have a two channel RF modulator that has two little pots you can adjust to whatever channels you want.  I have it plugged into my cable system via an amplifier.  We only have cable for the internet as we use satellite for TV, so at the interface they have a trap set up to trap between about 60MHz and starts rolling off around 470MHz.  The cable modem uses an uplink and downlink outside of this range.  I get about a dozen analog channels that they don't filter out and there are some digital channels mixed in there as well higher than CATV 78.  The RF modulator outputs on two channels that are within the blocked range which sends my satellite boxes to all the other rooms in the house, plus the cable channels.  I haven't tried putting it somewhere unused above 470MHz but have thought about it.  I'm sure maybe a few neighbours would be able to see it if I did.  Not sure how many actually would though.  How often does the average person rescan channels on their TV?