using terrestrial antenna in combination with satellite

[francu]

Hi all, great forum here!

I'm trying to drop my cable company, and I noticed that my lifetime receiver has a terrestrial antenna input. So I figured I'd give it a try and check what channels I would get (and hopefully get enough so that I can ditch my cable company, which I hate).

So I connected an antenna to that input, and then I got stuck. I don't know how to scan it. There is no option in the menus to scan a terrestrial antenna, only a satellite one. I know I could just skip the receiver, connect my TV via RF cable to the receiver and scan for channels on my TV. But it would be nice to be able to scan using the receiver, that way I wouldn;t have to rely on the TV for reception, and I guess the image quality would be better too. I searched the fortec star site, there's no explanation there.

Please help! Thanks!

[Sadoun]

Francu

The RF connector on the back of the LifeTime is only a pass through. The satellite receiver does not have a built-in TV Tuner like your regular TV or VCR.

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[dtsexpert]

The Lifetime does not any analog tuner. The RF loop-thru just passes what ever analog signal you feed to it.
Connect the OTA antenna to the RF input, then connect the RF output to your receiver. Use the TV to scan the OTA channels. When you want to watch the OTA, you either can hit the button TV/OTA of something like that or just put the receiver in standby mode.
Michael

Originally Posted by francu

Hi all, great forum here!

I'm trying to drop my cable company, and I noticed that my lifetime receiver has a terrestrial antenna input. So I figured I'd give it a try and check what channels I would get (and hopefully get enough so that I can ditch my cable company, which I hate).

So I connected an antenna to that input, and then I got stuck. I don't know how to scan it. There is no option in the menus to scan a terrestrial antenna, only a satellite one. I know I could just skip the receiver, connect my TV via RF cable to the receiver and scan for channels on my TV. But it would be nice to be able to scan using the receiver, that way I wouldn;t have to rely on the TV for reception, and I guess the image quality would be better too. I searched the fortec star site, there's no explanation there.

Please help! Thanks!

[francu]

Thank you all for the replies! That's what I figured, not TV tuner on the receiver. But then why does the user manual show a configuration where the terrestrial antena is connected to the receiver, and the receiver is connected to the TV via RCA cables (one video and two audio)? It is listed in 4. Connection Diagram, subsection 3) And it does say it is preferrable to use RCA rather than RF cable. Funny.

[Sadoun]

FRANCO

Some people have old TVs that don't have RCA Audio/Vedio inputs. So, they must use the RF output on the satellite receiver to connect to the TV. Since your TV has only one RF output, it is requred that you disconnect the Aerial from your TV and connect it to the satelite receiver. Then connect the RF output of the satellite receiver to the TV. When you turn the satellite receiver OFF, the TV will receiver signal from the Aerial OTA antenna.

If you have RCA A/V inputs on your TV, it is better to use the RCA cable instead. The Lifetime comes with a nice RCA cable.

:wink:

[francu]

That was not my point. I do have RCA cables and I'm not using RF cables. My point is that the manual specifies that you could in theory use an aerial antenna with your receiver using RCA cables to connect the TV. But for that to work the receiver would have to include a TV tuner. In short, I cannot connect an aerial antenna to the receiver and then the receiver via RCA video, because there wouldn't be any device to do the tunning.
The only choice seems to be to use the receiver simply as a pass through, which I don't know why I would do when I can simply connect the antenna directly to the TV.

Thanks,
Cristian

Originally Posted by Sadoun

FRANCO

Some people have old TVs that don't have RCA Audio/Vedio inputs. So, they must use the RF output on the satellite receiver to connect to the TV. Since your TV has only one RF output, it is requred that you disconnect the Arial from your TV and connect it to the satelite receiver. Then connect the RF output of the satellite receiver to the TV. When you turn the satellite receiver OFF, the TV will receiver signal from the Arial OTA antenna.

If you have RCA A/V inputs on your TV, it is better to use the RCA cable instead. The Lifetime comes with a nice RCA cable.

:wink:

[dtsexpert]

Cristian,
Yes, your point is correct. There is no analog tuner in DVB receiver, therefore you can "convert" the FR signal for RCA type (video, audio l/r)
Take VCR as an example, since the VCR has analog tuner, users can use it to tune to any OTA channel, or to use it to "convert" from RF to RCA.
In your case, the RF pass thru might not be useful, but you still can "combine" OTA and DVB into one cable if your TV has input limitation.
Some old TV only accept RF so the RF pass-thru is pretty useful in that situation.
Michael

Originally Posted by francu

That was not my point. I do have RCA cables and I'm not using RF cables. My point is that the manual specifies that you could in theory use an aerial antenna with your receiver using RCA cables to connect the TV. But for that to work the receiver would have to include a TV tuner. In short, I cannot connect an aerial antenna to the receiver and then the receiver via RCA video, because there wouldn't be any device to do the tunning.
The only choice seems to be to use the receiver simply as a pass through, which I don't know why I would do when I can simply connect the antenna directly to the TV.

Thanks,
Cristian