# Hotel distribution cable and Live Video Feeds



## gattis1972 (Mar 20, 2007)

I have a customer that has a local cable company setup to distribute to each room. The cable company is using channels 2 through 125 distributing on all his TVs in each room. 

He wants to add in a VCR/Camcorder live feed of his pool area for his customers to watch thier children. 

He has tried to do this by hooking up the camcorder to a channel master modulator. He is not succesful it shows a distorted picture due to every channel being used by the cable company. His TV's do not go any higher then 125 so what is he to do to get this live feed setup? 

He can not use channel 3 or 4 because those are the local channels his customers want to watch.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.


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## dduensing (Oct 5, 2007)

You'll need to pick out a VHF cable channel (2-13) you wish to remove, buy a good quality trap (filter), for it, then get an RF modulator for this channel number for the camcorder feed, then combine the two signals.

In the old analog OTA days, the cable company would put up a computerized "bulletin-board" type channel on the some of the broadcast channel slots to eliminate the ghosting problems. Pre-empting one of these channels is what most motel/apartment building systems do.


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## AntAltMike (Nov 21, 2004)

It is unlikely that the hotel rooms are viewing channels up to 125 If you are in an analog market, basic cable usually stops below channel 80 and you could use a simple lowpass filter to clear the spectrum above that.

Even if your system is substantially digital, chances are that at least channels 2-22 are still analog. In my major market, I can delete channels 13 and 16 (city council and public service) to allow me to insert two channels. I have seen cable companies skip one or more channels that overlap FM (97-99), and often times, those channels are clear enough for re-use. You can also delete a shopping channel if you so choose. The cable company won]t like that, but they won't stop you.

Channel elimination filters have to have a pass-band that passes the entire cable spectrum. FWIW, I scoped out a Blonder Tongue single channel elimination filter that was only rated to 750 MHz but had no significant attenuation right up to 860 MHz. On the other hand, if you buy an older elimination filter rated to 550 MHz, it surely willl excessively roll off the higher frequency channels.

Does your company have the expertise to do this professionally? Do you own a spectrum analyzer, do you have relations with the filter manufacturers (Blonder Tongue, Microwave Filter, Pico, Holland)? If so, they can advise you on suitable channel elimination products that they might furnish.


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## AntAltMike (Nov 21, 2004)

If you want to do this cheap (who doesnt?) someone on eBay is selling cylindrical channel 98-99 filters for $4.95 plus 6.90 shipping. Channels 98 and 99 are just above the FM band (108-120 MHz)


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## gattis1972 (Mar 20, 2007)

Thank you both so much for this information. This helped tremedously. My customer had contacted the cable company as well and was told the same thing. They didn't seem to care if he implimented this or they did. I will let you know how it goes.


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