chris moos's blog

I recently purchased my first Tivo, an 80-hour Series2. I got home, hooked everything up, and after everything was setup I realized that Cox Communications in Tempe does not have any analog channels above 22(their “expanded” service). This made me really upset because I have lived in other areas in Phoenix and analog service above 22 was always available. I came to find out that in Tempe they are still using 550Mhz lines, which means they don’t have the bandwidth to put all of their services on so they took away the expanded channels from analog.

I decided I needed to find a solution because having a dual tuner DVR with only one tuner usable kinda sucks. (I don’t watch much TV below 22, mostly 22 – 60). I ended up hooking up a second digital cable box to the Tivo. Obviously you can’t have tivo IR blast two digital boxes, but with a little workaround I can at least watch a show while another is recording.

The digital cable box modulates channel 4 for the RF out on the back, so I ran a coaxial from the second digital cable box OUT to the Tivo’s coaxial in. I then told my Tivo in Channel List Settings that only channel 4 was available on ‘cbl’. This allows me to let my Tivo use one tuner to record shows from my primary digital cable box and while it is doing that I can switch to channel 4 on my tivo and use my digital cable remote(for second box) to watch TV.

It is a little bit of an inconvenience to use 2 remotes, but often I don’t watch TV while its recording something also, so its not that big of a deal. Hopefully this gives people that are in Tempe or other places where they have stripped analog channels a little workaround until your cable provider adds analog(or if they never do).