receiving radio channels from cable

softcon

After discussing my success building an fm radio with someone, I was asked if I could build them a radio that would plug into their cable connection, an play the music stations they receive over their cable subscription. My response was that I'm sure I could, but as I thought about it more, I'm not so sure.
Has anyone done this, and if so, how was it done?
Can I simply connect a coax connector to the propeller, and have the propeller handle the audio feeds?
I tend to doubt it, since those feeds are multiplexed something fierce. Anyone know if there's a product out there already I could use for this job?
They have no interest in receiving the tv portion of the signal, just something they could set on top of their dresser or desk or something, plug in the cable wire, and start selecting the audio feeds for the radio channels which the company feeds to them over the coax.
I know some high-end stereos can do this sort of thing, but what's out there for the do it yourselfer, anybody know?

Oldbitcollector (Jeff)

@softcon

No, I doubt it would be possible to directly connect "cable-tv" cable to a Propeller and play back the audio channels. That being said, there are many very interesting projects which use the Propeller connected to Ethernet to stream things like Weather information from the net to your TV.

Here are some things which the Propeller is fully capable:

* Connect to your TV for low-res video and text
* Play back .WAV file audio
* Connect to the Internet (with a connected Ethernet addon)

You have just scratched the surface of what can be done with the Propeller. There is a TON of good stuff to do.

Here's some ideas of the kind of projects that the Propeller is capable of.

http://www.gadgetgangster.com/tutorials.html

OBC

Mike Green

It depends on how the cable company carries the audio FM signals. If they advertise that you can attach an FM radio to their cable connection without a converter box, then any FM radio should do including the one that Parallax sells for use with the QuickStart board. If the cable company requires a converter box for the FM, then you can't just connect an FM radio of any kind to the cable. I'm not sure how you'd connect the cable to the FM radio. You'd probably have to build it into a small metal (shielded) box, have a connector for the cable, connected to a small loop of wire (coupler) positioned near the antenna connection on the FM radio.

ericball

As per Mike, there's two ways to get radio from your cable TV provider:
1. Analog - just like analog TV, the same frequency band is used but sent via the coax rather than over the air. The only difference is the signal strength is interference free and likely higher. So whatever you would use to receive FM from an antenna can be used to receive it via cable.
2. Digital - basically it's an audio-only digital TV channel so (assuming it's not encrypted) you'd need to tune to the correct 6MHz channel, demodulate QAM-256, then decode the MPEG-2 transport stream. Not something the Propeller is up for without a whole whack of external hardware.