Mediacom → Re: [IA] Mediacom Iowa City/Coralville frequency assignments?

There are a few options you could try out. There are QAM modulators you can get to inject your signal. Talk to your local office about what the local injection channel is. We use different channels in different systems for this. I know out of the Cedar Rapids head end QAM 5.4 will inject on 998 on digital boxes. Advantage here is there is a channel on your digital box that will display this without having to switch inputs. I would advise against using the downstream DOCSIS channels for your insertion. If something goes wrong and you end up pushing your CCTV signal back out to plant, you may end up with your cable disconnected in a hurry.

When you do inject you would need to run a DC in reverse to inject the signal properly. incoming signal on the through leg, jumper to your splitter on the input, and the signal to inject on the tap leg. This will degrade your signal and may require a house amp to compensate, but will clamp down on your CCTV from reaching plant. The notch filter would be placed on the output leg of the DC between you and outside plant.

I have a Channel Plus 5545 four channel RF modulator, it can't do QAM just regular NTSC RF, on UHF channels 14-69 or analog cable channels 65-125. There's no reason to spend many hundreds of dollars on a QAM modulator when I already own something that will work.

Now I'm not sure if injecting an analog signal will work with my Tivo Premieres (using a cable card) or mediacom HD receivers, but if I can't tune the analog CCTV channels using those I'll simply add a splitter at each TV and have the signal run into the TV's RF connection and be able to tune it that way. If it were possible to run additional cables I would have the CCTV run directly to each TV's RF connection over a separate coax, but that's simply not possible with the way my house was built.

Unfortunately it appears I can't use the frequencies being used for cable modems since 100-140 MHz is well outside the modulator's range. I need to use channels between 450 and 800 MHz. I have found several possible filters to use, all of which are unidirectional so there will be no signal backfeeding to worry about. I just need to know what frequencies I can use.

If I pick channels carrying encrypted QAM like OldCableGuy suggests, how will I know what channels I'm wiping out? I can't just choose them at random, all the HD channels are encrypted, and I obviously use many of them. There has to be some way to know what channels are assigned to what frequencies. On my Tivo I can tune a channel and see what frequency it is using via the cable card menu, for example ESPN HD channel 830 is 219 Mhz. I can tune channels I don't get, when I tune PPV channel 501 it shows 747 MHz.

I suppose I could tune every single channel, see what frequency it is using, and create a huge spreadsheet, but surely it is possible to get this information from mediacom? I realize it would be subject to change, but I doubt they move things around all the time for no reason. If I had a list of the frequencies for every channel, I could choose exactly what frequencies to step on knowing I won't wipe out anything I care about. I don't get PPV or any of the movie channels since I use Netflix and Amazon. If there is a large block of those somewhere above 450 MHz it'd be perfect for my needs.

Nexis thanks for your post, that's unbelievably good info...