On Monday, I will attend two different meetings dealing with the Public, Educational and Government Access channels in an area served by Cablevision in Connecticut. One of the issues that is likely to be discussed is the movement of PEG channels from an analog cable signal to a digital cable signal.

When I first heard about this, I was surprised. It had not occurred to me that when all of the broadcast channels moved to digital in the United States this year, that so much of the cable broadcasting remains analog and that moving channels from analog to digital would be an issue. However, the concerns about moving analog cable channels to digital channel signals remains as much, if not a bigger issue than we saw with the move from analog to digital broadcast signals.

I don't watch a lot of television, and currently when we watch television, it is on an old analog TV tuned to channel 3 which gets its signal from a cable box. I never paid a lot of attention to what is coming in on the cable prior to the cable box.

However, this is a concern for others. Some people have multiple televisions in there homes. They may have a cable box in the living room, but other rooms are simply getting whatever they can for remaining analog signals off of the cable for televisions in other rooms. As channels move to digital on the cable, they are no longer available to these other televisions, unless upgrades or new equipment is purchased.

It turns out that I have a digital receiver that I can use to receive either broadcast or cable television signals and make them available on PCs. I have a Pinnacle PCTV HD Ultimate stick. This is a tuner on a USB stick that receives analog, ATSC and Clear QAM channels and allow them to be viewed, or recorded on a PC.

Initially, I had used it to record programs during the Presidential elections. Yet in discussions preparing for meetings on Monday, I figured I should dust off the old TV Tuner stick and try to get a better sense of what is going on with the signal coming in on my cable.

Initially, I had connected the TV Tuner stick to my laptop running Windows Vista. Unfortunately, I've had various problems with Vista since then, and it will no longer recognize the TV Tuner stick, or any memory stick for that matter.

My next thought was to try it on my Linux laptop. Searching on the web, I found a few references to the stick and Linux. As best as I could tell several people had modified the Linux kernel to add a device driver for the stick and it seemed like maybe a third of them were successful. It really looked like too much work for the weekend.

So, on to plan B. I hooked up the TV Tuner stick to Kim's desktop computer. It is running Windows XP and managed to get the software to eventually run on the desktop.

The next problem was finding the PEG channels. I did a scan and found hundreds of digital channels. However, many don't seem to work. They are probably encrypted, and most of the channels that did work ended up with names like 821.916 instead of anything useful. However, it turns out that 821.916 is what the tuner calls the channel. This channel is at a frequency of 171 Mhz. It is a Digital Mpeg2 channel with service ID 916, Original Network ID 0 , Transport Stream Id 48431, PMT PID 38 and PCR PID of 36. It turns out that this is the Government Access channel.

Given that the tuner handles both ATSC and QAM, I don't know if this is ATSC or QAM encoding. The educational channel is 821.915, same Frequency and video standard. The service id is 915, the original network id is 0, the transport stream id is 48431, the PMT PID is 41 and the PCR PDI is 39. The Public Access Channel is 821.912. You can probably guess everything except the PMT PID and the PCR PID which are 87 and 72 respectively.

I also mapped out other channels. CSPAN is 891.2 at 627 MHZ. Transport Stream ID 48154, PMT PID 231 and PCR PID of 121. CT-N is 105.3 Frequency 681 Mhz, Transport Stream ID 48404, PMT PID 167, PCR PID 107. As one other reference, WCBS-HD is 2.1 at 759 Mhz, service Id 702, Transport Stream 600, PMT PID 1065 PCR PID 1056.

If anyone else is using ATSC or QAM tuners in Cablevision Connecticut area and want to compare notes, I can gather more of this information and share it and would be very interested in hearing your experiences.

As a final note, it appears as if you can now buy Pinnacle PCTV HD Ultimate Sticks for about $50 at various places online. It looks like a good way to get add HD television reception, at least for some channels on some PCs.

What does this all mean for Monday? I don't know. I'll explore it and see what comes up at various meetings.