Making in house HD Channels

For the longest time I have been looking for a modulator that would do HD signals. I have used the standard def modulators for probably a good 25+ years and always loved making my own “cable system” in the house with various channels for different things. However with the advent of HD TV, the SD modulators were just not going to cut it for a good HD picture.

In recent years I have had a security DVR that was outputting to a SD modulator that could be viewed on any TV in the house. While it was “ok”, I always wanted the HD version of it. So one night while I was thinking of running HDMI cables from the security dvr to every TV in the house, I stumbled on VeCOAX HD Modulators from Pro Video Instruments which are $495.

Previously when I had searched for HD modulators for either ATSC or QAM the only ones that were even sort of “cheap” where from a company called ZeeVee. However, they were still a little more expensive than what I was wanting to pay with the cheapest that I saw was like around $1,200USD. So I just put up with the SD modulators until I found the VeCOAX ones.

VeCOAX has a modulator called the MiniMod-2 which will take one HDMI source and put it on any ATSC or CATV QAM channel you would like. It supports any frequency in the normal TV/CATV bands and supports ATSC to mix with OTA channels or QAM to mix with CATV channels. It also supports PSIP so you can add a 4 character label to the channel and make the channel appear as any other channel. For example, I have my modulator on CATV Channel 14, but the PSIP says it is channel 1-1.

Initially I tried to use 1080p output, but all of my TV’s (2 Samsung’s and 1 Sony) had some issues. Either the input to the modulator from the security DVR was not a clean signal or the TV’s tuners just couldn’t handle it. So there was artifacts at the top of the screen and after a few hours or more the channel would just scramble and be un-viewable until I reset the modulator.

What I ended up having to do was set the source to be 720p and then set the modulator to attenuate the signal some since it was also over-powering the tuners in the TV’s. Once I did that, the signal has been stable for a few weeks or more now.

Now the next thing to test is hooking it or another one up to a TiVO to see if it can send the TiVO signal through out the house as well. Then I may also try to do some HAM Amateur TV with it since i can set the frequency to anything.