Exterior tuner?

No more elegant and not much different.

Sure but probably more expensive than a VCR today.

Kal

You are best off to use a VCR as a tuner. There are some stand alone tuners, but they are very expensive, in comparison to the price of a new TV set.

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JANA _____

My question is this: is there any such thing as an exterior TV tuner I could connect to this TV, perhaps via coax, and control remotely? Basically, I'm looking at a way to channel surf. For now, I'll probably connect an old VCR to it and use the VCR for channel switching (the TV is in the guest bedroom), thereby using the VCR's tuner, but I thought a standalone tuner might be a more elegant solution.

Any such thing?

Thanks,

Tracey

Get a DVD/VCR combo for it.

Tom

You can probably still find a "cable box" or "cable converter" at yard sales or flea markets these days. These things are exactly what you're asking for: an external tuner. They're typically not great though, only getting about 50 or 60 channels. The nice thing about them is that not only do you plug the coax cable through them to the TV, but also the power cord for the TV. So you *might* (depending on the TV) be able to turn the TV on and off with the cable box.

But obviously that's something you'll have to hunt for, and it isn't guaranteed to work wonderfully.

And as already mentioned, newer product of this sort might be more expensive than a VCR.

Really, I think using a VCR as you are is the most practical solution.

- NRen2k5

As you said, VCR is the most economical way to go. With DVD so popular you could get one at a garage sale for next to nothing.

In the TV service industry there are such things as 'tuner subbers,' effectively a stand alone tuner. I have not looked at them in probably

Michael Ware wrote:

A tuner subber put out an IF signal that was fed directly to the IF module input. They had detent type tuners for VHF and UHF. The ones I used had manual gain control. Not something I would use on a hot chassis.

We had one of those, I think it was a Panasonic. The reason for the separation was that the VCR portion had a battery pack in it and a video camera plugged into it. There was a padded carrying bag to hold the VCR which you carried around on your shoulder while using the camera, which was about the size of a fullsize VHS camcorder. I recall a friend of the family had a similar unit which didn't even have autofocus. Times have changed.

On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 09:45:44 GMT in sci.electronics.repair, "Michael A. Terrell" wrote,

That was like before isolation transformers were invented, right?

Of course not, but a couple of the early units were AC powered and you had to be aware of the risks involved. Even the battery powered versions had exposed connectors to watch out for. Its not something you want sitting there where other people could get hurt.

That is a different animal altogether. I have converted a number of those to stand alone TV demodulators for some of the TV stations I've worked at. I removed the umbilical cable that connected to the recorder and replaced it with a BNC connector for the video and a RCA jack for the audio outputs. There were plenty of composite video studio monitors around, but the Tektronics demodulator was rack mounted at the transmitter site. You could drop one of the converted units behind a rack and use the A/B switch on the monitor to look at the off air signal, or use it in a remote van to see when you went live.