Splitter on TV's one input for OTA and Cable?

[davidtwotrees]

Hey. I have a basic cable hookup. No box. Just the cable hooked up to the back of my Panny Plasma, Th-42PX75U. I would like to have access to the OTA HD programming. My apartment has an antenna hookup to an excellent roof antenna that I have used in the past when I didn't have cable. My question is, can I put a splitter right to the one Antenna/Cable In input, with the cable hooked to one side, and the OTA antenna feed to the other side? Will this allow me to watch cable and ota channels simultaneously? All the connections in the o.m. assume just one connection, or involve a cable box.

My Monster Power Center does have in and out connections for both ota and cable, but that would be a lot more cabling and if I can use the splitter at the input would be a much simpler solution. (assuming this is possible to watch both ota and cable) TIA. David TwoTrees

 

[Adam]

You can certainly try that, as it's inexpensive and won't hurt anything, but I doubt that it would work. I think that you'd need something like this A/B switch box from Radio Shack. The splitter is passive and requires no work, so it's worth a shot - but I wanted to mention the A/B switch because I think that you'd have to go that route.

 

[markw]

The OTA and cable channels come in on the came TV channels. How would you tell the TV tuner which channels you want to watch? The cable channels or the OTA channels?

You might get by with a 75 ohm A/B switch but most TV's tuners have to go through a "channel search" function when the source changes. You would have o do this each time you changed it.

If you used an external tunng device into your TV's video port, such as a cable box or one of those inexpensive OTA digital converter boxes*, you could have the best of both worlds with no problem.

Oops.. scratch that! An OTA HD tuner is in the neighborhood of $200. Maybe that cheap converter would work for cable if it had an analog pass-thru?

* even cheaper with that $40 coupon!

 

[poutanen]

The A/B switch would work fine, but your TV does have other inputs. Why not buy a cheap cable box (the old school boxes) that has RCA composite outputs, and run that into your TV, and leave the coax for the OTA antenna?

A cheap cable box will be a fine NTSC tuner, but the ATSC tuner in your TV is what you want for the antenna.

 

[poutanen]

Just to add to this, I did an auto program on my Samsung yesterday, and you can set it to look for both Air and Cable channels (Digital and Analog on both) so you may be able to combine the signals and get some. The cable will tend to overpower the air signal though, so it's unlikely you'll get the regular VHF/UHF channels, but you may get some digital OTA channels (some HD) that you wouldn't get with basic cable.

I just setup a Samsung plasma for my mom, and did a full scan on her cable line, and we picked up 15 HD channels that she wasn't getting with her SD digital cable box. Our cable company would have charged her $15 to rent a box to get those signals...