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).