[Darr]

The cable company in this little town offers digital channels, but nothing is encrypted so they do not use cable cards, period. Never have. I see M-cards on amazon are around $30... what type of equipment, exactly, is needed in the racks at the cable company to activate cable cards and pass-through the unencrypted digital channels to the Romio and newer?

Thanks.

 

[ThAbtO]

Do you have their cable service plan? Have you tried to view the channels on either your TV or Tivo?

It is possible to receive them without a cablecard.

 

[JoeKustra]

The cable company in this little town offers digital channels, but nothing is encrypted so they do not use cable cards, period. Never have. I see M-cards on amazon are around $30... what type of equipment, exactly, is needed in the racks at the cable company to activate cable cards and pass-through the unencrypted digital channels to the Romio and newer?
Thanks.

All a cable card does is decrypt channels and map QAM channels to whole numbers. My QAM message channel is 18.2 but I tune to 19 to watch it. It's not encrypted.

What are the call letters of your CBS station, its channel number and who is your provider? It will be hard have a good experience with your TiVo without a supported system, but not impossible. I had un-encrypted QAM for two years. When they went to encrypted I bought my TiVo since the Magnavox I was using didn't support cable cards.

BTW if you buy a cable card on eBay your cable company will not have the equipment to load a channel list to the card, so it won't work. But buy one since the cost about $5 just to see if I'm right. Motorola M-Card Cable card Multi Stream Cable 514517-002-00 612572142714 | eBay

 

[fcfc2]

The cable company in this little town offers digital channels, but nothing is encrypted so they do not use cable cards, period. Never have. I see M-cards on amazon are around $30... what type of equipment, exactly, is needed in the racks at the cable company to activate cable cards and pass-through the unencrypted digital channels to the Romio and newer?

Thanks.

Do you have a Roamio basic, which can do OTA and/or cable, or the Pro, Plus which can only do cable?