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Termyn8or -> RE: You know you're getting old... (6/27/2011 10:25:08 PM)
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"When I was in college, they had thins antenna thingie called "ON TV". "
I used to hack that out of Detroit. I figured how to "fix" the box. These boxes were all over the place in Cleveland and were initially tuned to UHF 61. On TV from Detroit was a few channels lower, it may have been 56 but it has been so long I am not sure. I owned a TV shop at the time and had a really good antenna which could pick up out of town stations easily. It was split into a hundred or so outlets, but if I got the main coming in and siconnected the distribution systyem I got ALOT of out of town channels.
The Preview box which was the same as the ON TV box was basically an addressable SSAVI 1 decoder. I had the physical address FUBARED and I think it was all zeros, which I think was probably what the company's owners had.The box worked well both for Preview and ON TV.
SAAVI 1 was sync suppression and video inversion. SSAVI 2 also fucked up the sound, and I cracked that eventually as well. Actuall I beat EVERY analog encoding scheme. The problem came with BMAC. BMAC was used on the old big ass satallite dishes and was digital. I knew people who cracked it, but the box to do so cost $11,000. That is what the cable industry called security. At eleven grand, it was cheaper to just pay for it. The fine was $25,000 for illegally decoding the signal, but to display it in a public place the fine was $250,000. Let's just say Wrestlemania wasn't worth it.
Before that, a scumbag maned George Forbes was the block against Cleveland getting cable TV. Nobody offered him enough bribe money. I don't really have a problem with that. But back then the cable companies were using a sinewave scrambling technique in the suburbs. The cable boxes were not even remote controlled ! Thirty six channels, about a half dozen scrambled. With a box taken apart it came clear that to set a box for pay chnnels they cut through traces on the front PC board to enable the severely tuned notch filter to make the signal watchable. As you turned the selector, the open connection enabled the decoder circuit. I modified a shitload of them and in the latest incarnation of the process I simply used a piece of Scotch Tape. That way if the cable guy showed up, all you had to do was to pull on a tab I attached to the tape and thus remove it. I had already beaten all the security measures intergrated in the cable box, and this was the final refinement of my, ummmm, process.
At one point I sold several modified boxes a week at $200 each. Back then I had ambition. Later I had one full time job, one part time and one in my basement fixing VCRs. Remember VCRs ? Later I peddled bigscreen TVs out the house for $500-700 each, to make "ends meet". We are talking the 1980s and 1990s here.
I don't have that kind of amibiton anymore, and that is the real problem. If I did I would probably be able to buy the internet off of Al Gore.
T^T
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