What is ATV?

[trainwreck100]

I saw this on another thread and I was wondering how you can tune a t.v. to pick up those high frequencies?

Thanks

 

[N_Jay]

You can use a front end and mixer and use a TV channel as the "IF".
Or you can get an ATV receiver and use a video monitor.
Or you can modify a TV UHF front end to receive the appropriate band.

 

[mam1081]

If they are on the 70cm ham band, you can put your TV on cable ch 57 to 61 and hook up an antenna to receive the transmissions. You must set your TV to "cable" even though you are using an antenna for this. This will put the TV around 425 or 437 MHz on RX.

Keep in mind that most ATV transmissions are not very strong at all - so don't expect to pick it up 50 miles from the source or something (unless they are putting out LOTS of power). Radio Shack sells a small UHF directional TV antenna that works ok for picking up 70cm ATV stuff.

Cable TV freqs:
Channel, Visual Carrier Freq (Normal Cable, HRC, IRC, Broadcast)
57 421.25 420.0210 421.25 729.25
58 427.25 426.0213 427.25 735.25
59 433.25 432.0216 433.25 741.25
60 439.25 438.0219 439.25 747.25
61 445.25 444.0222 445.25 753.25

 

[jhooten]

Or you can use one of the ATV channels that just happens to be the same as one of the CATV UHF channels (439.25 mHz/chan 60 is one of them),put the tv in cable mode, select the matching channel and use the TV as an ATV reciever without any mods at all.

 

[KD5WLX]

Tulsa ATV

There is an ATV repeater in Tulsa that's on the channel 8 backup tower west of town. It's high and runs reasonable power, with good coverage over most of the city and suburbs. When not transmitting amateur stuff, it transmits the channel 8 radar, so very useful to storm spotters.

However, it does NOT transmit on UHF - it's up in the 900MHz range. Downeast Microwave (among others) sells a downconverter (also available as a kit) that converts this from there down to the 433MHz range (cable TV channels mentioned earlier).

If you're close, you can listen on the Input side in UHF and hear the transmission from the ham, but need the downconverter to hear the output side of the repeater.