My mini head end -- a report

[Doug E.]

Originally Posted by kf4rca

Those BT modulators are great. I've got 2 fixed tuned BT's that I got for free. The older laptops often have composite out. But you can get a vga to ntsc scan converter real cheap these days. I've even seen them at thrift stores. The first one I ever bought was $99. It was made by ADS and was an 8-bit ISA card for a computer. It would only do 640x480. There was a program out there called showjpg.exe that I used to display test patterns. These days most scan converters that I see, are external units.

Discovering those mini-modulators was what inspired me to do my head end project. I was familiar with units like the AM-60 but didn't have room for anything that filled a full rack space. The fixed BT modulators (MICM) are a lot more common. I've got one for use as a spare. The agile models can be found but they cost more. My head end uses 2 AMCM-860D's & 1 ACM-806 (an older model without LED display). I like the 860D's because they have built-in volume normalization, which gets rid of one of the major annoyances of digital program sources. We had 12-channel cable when I was a kid, going back to 1967, & I remember how you could set the volume on your TV & barely have to budge it when switching channels.

Doug E.