Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Do Not Throw Away Your Old TV's Yet

If you have Comcast for your TV (this idea may apply to other cable providers also), you no longer supposedly can get TV reception via your cable connection unless you have an adapter box attached between the cable and TV set.  The adapter is provided by Comcast for a monthly fee after getting 2 adapter boxes for free.

If you reprogram your TV via auto programming feature on most TV sets, you might be able to restore TV reception to your TVs without an adapter box.  I did the auto programming process on 2 TVs and restored TV reception to those 2 TVs which happen to be rather new TVs.  I am able to get at least 60 plus TV channels on each of those 2 TVs.  I have an older TV and tried the auto programming feature, and even though I was able to access the auto programming feature, the procedure did not work for that TV apparently due to its age.  I cannot tell you how to access the auto programming feature since the access procedure to this feature is different on different TVs.  After doing the auto programming procedure try to access a TV station by punching in the channel directly on your remote, and if that does not work use the channel up/channel down on your remote.  On one of my TVs, I could not access a channel by punching in the channel directly on to the remote.  However, when I did the channel up/channel down on the remote I was able to access channels on that TV.

If that does not work, you can buy a converter box and an antenna from Best Buy or other electronic stores for a total price of $70+.  This supposed to give you TV reception, but not to all of the available channels.  This does not seem to be an economical option.

If you really want to access TV reception on that old TV, you can take the adapter box off of one of your TV sets and hook it up to the TV in question.  The adapter box is what gives you access to the TV channels and not the TV set itself.  The adapter boxes apparently can be moved to whatever TV you want to get reception.                                                                                             

The adapter boxes are proprietary to Comcast, and apparently cannot be replicated, and that is why there seems to be nothing in the market place to buy to make the old TVs work other than the adapters.  However, the auto programming procedure mentioned above could be of some help on TVs that are not too old.

So, before throwing away your old TVs due to lack of reception, do try this auto programming feature and see if your TV reception is restored.

No comments:

Post a Comment