ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner: AMD and Dell Bring CableCARD to PCs

The Installation: Day Two

The second day started off on a new foot. The same Time Warner tech from the day before showed up, but this time his supervisor was with him. The two brought new CableCARDs just in case the ones we tried earlier were somehow too old to work with the tuners. A third Time Warner employee also showed up, this one a regional digital engineer. A fourth Time Warner representative appeared during the course of the day, albeit due to a mistake in scheduling.

Testing levels at the outlet to make sure we had a good enough signal

The Time Warner trio joined us as we got both Microsoft and AMD on the phone trying to get to the bottom of our problems. There was a single OCUR test platform somewhere in the Raleigh area that had been activated and was currently in use on Time Warner's network, so we knew it was a solvable problem; it was just a matter of solving it. While yours truly went to work with AMD on tracing through the setup steps to make sure we didn't miss anything, Gary Lusk was on the phone with Microsoft and Dell making sure there wasn't anything else we could try. The three Time Warner folks also went to work; our peak number of concurrent telephone conversations was about 4 at this point (and that's not counting the one Time Warner rep who had two phones up to his head at once).

Two TWC techs

Two phones, one TWC tech

Everyone is on the phone

The first problem TWC fixed was with regards to our initial CableCARD installation. When a CableCARD is activated on TWC's network, the host id of the CableCARD is married to the device it is activated on. When we switched that CableCARD to one of the OCURs, TWC's system wouldn't let it on the network as it was married to two different devices. [Ed: So polygamy is out of the question?] The system should have automatically deleted the duplicate host id but it had to be manually done on Time Warner's end; after doing that, things started moving a lot smoother.

We were actually able to get some digital cable channels after Time Warner reset the CableCARDs on their end; however, we had trouble tuning to some channels and we'd randomly lose signal. Time Warner suspected that the wiring at our location might be a problem so they went to work on cleaning things up a bit. The cable signal coming in to the location was fed through a surge suppressor and then sent to an amp and two 8-way splitters. The techs removed the surge suppressor and replaced the amp with an amp of their own; this amp had a built in splitter that directly fed the coax inputs on the two TV Wonder DCTs.

Removing the surge suppressor and isolating the coax lines that went directly to the tuners helped a bit, and we could almost watch digital cable normally now. At the end of the entire ordeal, the senior TWC representative that was with us turned to us and asked us what this system could do. We explained, to which he responded with the most priceless of facial expressions. It was an expression that needed no explanation; his reaction asked the question "why on earth would you go through this when you can just rent an HD-DVR from us for $9 a month?"

There were still some lingering issues which we will get to shortly, but as far as Time Warner was concerned, the installation was complete. Dell and TWC left, leaving us to spend some quality time with the system.