Comcast/DTA box/QAM tuner

nlawalker

Hi all,

I hope this is the right place for this and that it doesn't belong in the TV thread or elsewhere.

My parents have Comcast HD service and a few TVs in the house. One is HD and they have an HD DVR for it, along with full-blast HD service, tons of channels, etc. The other is a standard analog CRT, and so when Comcast transitioned from analog to digital cable in their market, they got a DTA box to put on it.

They are ditching the old TV and replacing it with a newer TV that has a clear QAM tuner. Do they still need the DTA box? My understanding is that with the clear QAM tuner on the TV they will be able to get the "limited basic" channels (the most bare-bones channels) but to get anything beyond that they need to use the DTA box.

Cable stuff is so incredibly complicated, and I'm a software engineer.

Dehumanized

They'll probably be able to get a full range of standard definition TV. It'll all be on DTV extension channels, so it'll be hard as fuck to find the channel you want to watch, but if you're willing to patiently go through and figure out what belongs where, you can watch pretty much everything but on demand stuff and (non-local network) HD channels.

For example, using a cable box in my area Comedy Central is on channel 60. Using my TV's ATSC tuner, it's on channel 37-9 (and a couple other places).