Propose New Sticky: Tips, Tricks and Traps of QAM Scanning

[MJC]

It's another beautiful Saturday and I'm spending hours with the lineups again. Obviously, this isn't my forte.

I noticed that there are no stickys in this forum and propose that we collectively develop one to deal with the QAM scan headache. There's not a huge amount of documentation on the scan process. If you have the same situation that I do, you get 80 or show channels in the scan, most of which are pure garbage. The ones you want/need seem to always be dead center in the middle of the result.

What have others found to make this easier? Perhaps you've gone back to the earlier way to do this (custom lineup) because you've found a source for the frequencies. Perhaps you've found a better way to identify the channels (hint: don't do this on a Saturday; it's all mop and cosmetics infomercials).

Let's collect everything and put it here for all to use.

MJC

[TomXP411]

One thing I found is that the station callsigns are in the channel data, even though you don't see them in BTV. It would be nice if BTV could recognize the callsigns and automatically map them to the HD channel in the cable TV lineup. Even if it can't, it'd still be nice to show the callsigns of the channels found. It woudl reduce the time it takes to map channels from a couple of hours down to a few minutes (after the initial 20 minute ordeal.)

It would also be nice if we could somehow feed that information back to Snapstream.net so other people coudl take advantage of that info.

[mayhem70]

Well in my case, I have PIP (picture in picture) and PSP (picture side picture) on my tv and it has a QAM tuner. Using the callsigns and matching up the screens, it made it really easy to hammer through the mapping process, even though I have to do it twice since the 2250 and the HDHR can't seem to share the same QAM mapping.