Picked up two DirecTV satellite boxes

[W3XWT]

I have yet to see a cable box that wasn’t a red-haired stepchild of illegitimate parentage. And, that includes the one which I designed for a long-ago former employer to meet a franchise requirement and was manufactured by “Cableproductos de Chihuahua S.A. de C.V.” In my home, I’ve had various boxes by “Jerry’s Kids” (the most insipid of which was one which had 12 pushbuttons which reminded me of the keys on a toddler’s piano, a three-position bat-handled switch on one side and a roller-adjust “fine-tuning” knob… the second one my girlfriend of the era and I had in our apartment added a descrambler to get Showtime and took almost a minute to re-generate the sync!), “Scientists Whose Varsity Delights Now Contain Crisco” who made the least offensive box (but was the most sensitive to high levels… ), and the boxes made first by a radio corporation which no longer made radios but also made STV boxes of a variety of types with the biggest and hottest-running wall warts I’ve ever seen (This company also created many jobs for repair technicians..) –their boxes came in a variety of flavors including something designed to have the video IF off of a suitably-equipped VCR looped-thru it, using the VCR tuner and programming. Unfortunately, the audio was “unprocessed” and there was a noticeable loss of lip-sync especially on something encoded! Also, it didn’t work with either a dual-cable system, with a system using channel mapping or HRC bringing additional thrills.

Ahhh… the old days of cable boxes. Where the parts went in before the name went on!