Mike...It sounds to me like you might have hooked your cable box to the TV antenna input instead of the cable connection. Not sure as I have a Samsung. To get full HD your cable box must also be HDTV capable. Make sure it is. Then if need only connect the cable box via HDMI cable to the HDMI input of the TV to see full HD.

You might not have done that. Check again. Don't connect the cable box (if it is HD) to the standard cable connection or the antenna input. It sounds like that is what you might have had and is why it found all those channels.

First thing you may note when you setup the TV or product, such as a DVR, is that it takes quite a long time (10-30 minutes) to perform an auto programming of all available channels when you are on a cable system. In the past, your TV or other product was limited to the analog only channels up to 125, but with most cable systems typically limited to channel 99 or lower, in which case you needed a cable box to receive the digital tier above that. With QAM, you can now receive that digital tier directly but that also adds another couple hundred more channels for which your product will search, hence the time required for a complete channel scan.

Once this is completed you are in for another surprise: You have channel numbers that you didn't know existed and that do not appear in the guide from your cable company. For example, you may find in scanning that you can receive the FNC channel as number 90-002 on your product, but the cable company channel guide states this channel is on 224. Furthermore, you may find that 90-003 is MTV which your cable guide states as being on 176. If your product supports a cable card, and you are going to get one for it, then you can skip to the end of this article. If you intend to get a cable box that will resolve all your tuning issues as well.

The reason for this channel discrepancy is that the actual transmission has nothing to do with the sequence or linear channel numbers shown on your product. This was a huge problem in the early 80s with the introduction of analog cable tuners on televisions that required the customer to properly setup and often times only allowed about 20 channels to be setup or stored. Manufacturers provided transmission to channel number conversion charts in the owners manual to assist, yet a great deal of effort was spent in the field helping customers setup their product. To recall that time, a much simpler time indeed, the sequential transmission of the channels was 2-6, 14-21, 7-13, 22 on up. Yes, 14 follows 6, 7 follows 21 and 22 follows 13! This was unexpected for many folks and difficult to wrap their brains around. Fortunately by the late 80s these manual tuners were replaced with digitally controlled tuners that removed this hassle and allowed the user to watch any channel they could receive just like having a cable box. Most have forgotten or never experienced this era of manual tuners.

QAM digital cable is far worse in this regard because there is no universal sequence like we had for analog cable. On top of that, many channels will be stored that will appear blank when you tune to them; those are the pay digital channels. You may also see channel numbers come and go. Those are Video-On-Demand (VOD) and Pay-Per-View (PPV) channels that are created on the fly for the customer and removed once the viewing has ended. Nobody can tell you how the raw channel numbers will be displayed for the cable company in your area unless one of your local citizens figures it out, documents it and makes that available on the internet. Many can appear between known analog cable channels, adding to the confusion.

(this is from the article at http://www.hdtvmagazine.com/articles/2007/02/atsc_cable_qam.php which contains a link to a good example mapping chart for a cable system in Atlanta which you will see resembles what you observed on your Armstrong system ... take a look at it)

See also Wikipedia entry for "digital cable" which includes the following:

"The addition of this capability complicates the notion of a "channel" in digital cable (as well as in over-the-air ATSC digital broadcasts). The formal names for these three numbers are the "major channel" number, "minor channel" number, and "physical channel".

The major number is also known as a virtual channel number. This is a number that the broadcaster chooses that can display on your television (if their cable box doesn't reassign it) that masks the actual "physical channel."

The minor channel is a logical channel of data within the major/physical channel. Technically there can be up to 1024 minor channels in a major channel, though in practice only a few are used (since the bandwidth must be divided among the minor channels).

The physical channel is a number corresponding to a specific frequency range. See: North American cable television frequencies.

There are two ways providers try to make this easier for consumers. The first is PSIP, in which program and channel information is broadcast along with the video, allowing the consumer's decoder (set-top box or display) to automatically identify the many channels and subchannels.

Second, in an effort to hide subchannels entirely, many cable companies map virtual channel numbers to underlying major and minor channels. For example, a cable company might call channel 5-1 "channel 732" and channel 5-2 "channel 733". This also allows the cable company to change the frequency of a channel without changing what the customer sees as a channel number. In such arrangements, the major/minor channel number are called the "QAM channel", and the alternative channel designation is called the "mapped channel", "virtual channel", or simply "channel"."

http://www.nwi.net/HDTV%20Without%20a%20Set-top-box.htm shows another example from Seattle.

I know you are not in or near these 2 locations, but I think these are very good examples to help you understand what you are seeing.

You may want to try asking on some of the Pittsburgh-area DTV/HDTV newsgroups to see if anyone has a chart for your Armstrong system. Or maybe you want to make one up and share it with other folks ?

Thanks, EBWatch - that's the info I was looking for - I didn't know thats how the signals were sent.

I thought it was neat - and starting a chart is a good idea. It'd be great to find more little hidden gems like Fox 53 HD.

Jack - my usual HD setup through the cable box works perfectly fine and the HDMI looks great. Armstrong's HD selection is getting better. We've got KDKA, WQED, TNT, TBS, A&E, MTV, FSN PIT, SportsTime Ohio, NFL, ESPN 1 + 2, HDNet, HDNet movies, UniversalHD, NatGeo. They look amazing, so I give Armstrong props for that, and we've never had issues with our DVR, which handles HD really well.

Mike: Glad the brief summaries were useful :-)

Jack: Maybe EMGR should "host" a wiki where folks can maintain a list of the channel mappings for their cable TV systems ? I think that might be very useful and popular as more viewers get (H)DTV receivers.

An HDTV Channel Wiki page could be created at the current Everything Erie Wiki.

http://wiki.erieblogs.com