By now you should be receiving nothing but *maybe* a few radio stations. Rogers was aware of this for a while & has decided to encrypt all digital channels. Just a guess, lol :)

Just checked and the 83.xx stations are all gone after only a month. The radio stations and the 113.xx stations are still there but they are obviously leaving the 113.xx stations because they are just repeats of channels that they offer under basic cable whereas the new 'Seattle' ones were part of their timeshift package. All the PPV and HOD stations are now locked down.

Personally I think Rogers isn't smart enough to know when stations were becoming 'unscrambled' during whatever testing that they were doing, that would be giving them too much credit. If anything, they were relying on us to tell them in this thread and everytime we found any 'free' channels, they would cut us off.

Like we've seen in the free OTA HD thread, there's a simple reason why OMNI 1 and 2 HD are not being broadcast free OTA, they are owned by Rogers. Why the CRTC allows such a monopoly I'll never understand. You can pick any cell phone provider you want but you can't pick your cable provider. Where's the competition in that?

Bell needs to pull up their socks and introduce a FiOS-style service.

Daniel,

In my area, Rogers has decided to unencrpyt the radio stations (sans CJCL - Fan 590, which I can not identify so far). It is in the 130.xx range on my north side of Steeles. May be worth scanning in for some.

Interesting - I'll check it out. There's really no logical reason to encrypt them, especially since they used to broadcast open FM for decades as a convenience.

Well, it's been a while but I finally updated the channel list. Basically it's the same as before, but I've restored the full radio section, now in the 134.XX range in Markham (it had come and gone several times before), and there's now ONE On Demand promo channel you can use to see if your QAM tuner works. That's about it.

Here in Ottawa today I get the following:

79.764 - On Demand preview
93.xx - digital music channels
110.1104 - BET
113.2108 - CTV Montreal
113.2110 - CBC Montreal
121.xx - radio stations

Just re-scanned the digital cable channels (I have regular analogue Rogers cable, Bayview/Davisville area in Toronto), and found some very interesting results, in addition to all the music channels:

110.103: Peachtree
110.106: Spike
110.107: CNN
110.108: TLC
110.110: AMC
114.206: Food
114.207: History

None of them are in HD, but this is very weird, as I don't even get these channels on my regular cable package anymore (scaled back to Basic Cable).

These are likely in the process of being re-organized (moved to new locations). Often the encryption is dropped for a while, then it suddenly re-appears. Or maybe they forgot! :-)

Updated the list. Two new radio stations: WNED AM 970 NPR Radio and WNED FM 94.5 Classical. Two additional useless video screens.

Slightly more interesting is the availability of the 3 Rogers TV Mix channels, where you can watch six different news, sports or kids channels at once. All six audio streams are also available for each channel.

In the USA its actually illegal to encrypt OTA signals provided on cable TV. Surprisingly the satellite providers there get away with it. Here in Canada everyone is getting away with it. Ah what do I care, I don't have cable TV. :)

I wonder if they will be able to get away with it once everything is digital.   I suspect that when everything is digital, they will invert it, so that people with digital TV's will get everything clear, and people with older analog TV's will need to have a  a QAM tuner box that the cable company will nicely rent to you for $20 a month extra.  Of course pay channels will still need the descrambler box or card.

GREAT THREAD! I needed to learn a bit about qam etc and apparently I came to the right place. Thanks Daniel.

I am getting a new USB tv tuner for my PC. This model has ATSC/NTSC/QAM. This one: [Link: canadacomputers.com]

My question is: when I finally break down and pay Rogers (grrrrr, rogers) for HD service and rent a stupid box from them... will I be able to somehow get HDTV on my PC via my ATSC USB tuner? Something like a cable splitter after their box, one input going into my hdtv and one input into my usb tuner? Would that work? I think the spliter would block the box's signal back to Rogers and theyd cut me off or something? So then what advantage is there for a Canadian to have ATSC on their usb tv tuner? I think I'm still a bit confused... :)

ATSC is the standard used by the free OTA Digital signal like CBC , CTV and the likes. Clear QAM are the un-encrypted signals that Rogers sometimes by mistake sends down the cable (see frisbeepilot post). Rogers always encrypt almost all their signals since it is a pay service.

So if you want to watch free HDTV you have to use a UHF antenna and connect it to your new USB ATSC tuner. Makes no sense to split the rogers signal looking for HDTV even if you are a subscriber since you need a Rogers HD set-up box to decode those signals unles as a hobby you want to see what you can receive without encryption.

Hope it helps.

Typically the HD Box will put out a single channel, so while you can split it, you simply get the same channel on both.  Often these boxes use a 3 connector cable (left, right, video), a 5 connector cable (left, right, blue, green, red) or HDMI cable.  If there is a cable type output, it's only intended for very old TV's that do not have video inputs, I don't think many TV's made in the last 10 years or so, have not had some kind of video input. 

ATSC is intended for over the air broadcasts, these can be obtained in major centres quite easily.  I currently get 6 channels in HD using ATSC (yeah,
CBC, CTV, RDI, OMNI 1, OMNI 2, CITY) and 3 more analog(NTSC) , TVO, GLOBAL, SUN TV if the weather is clear and it's late I can get GLOBAL and SUN in HD as well.  This is off a home built UHF antenna in a basement window.  Now I am in the north end of Toronto.  If I could get the antenna higher then I would have no problem getting Buffalo as well.   Nice thing is, I don't pay Rogers anything.