Trouble hooking up components with dish channel 60 on tv

[palominoz]

Hi!

I need some help with connecting components to a 2nd TV (only one RF input on back of TV with no RCA cable connections) that has a Dish satellite connection. The channel to watch DISH is 60 and the components are only for channel 3 or 4. I am trying to attach a DVD recorder as well as a RCA VCR (to transfer some old tapes to DVDs).

Any help would be appreciated!

[MrBoylan]

Hi!

I need some help with connecting components to a 2nd TV (only one RF input on back of TV with no RCA cable connections) that has a Dish satellite connection. The channel to watch DISH is 60 and the components are only for channel 3 or 4. I am trying to attach a DVD recorder as well as a RCA VCR (to transfer some old tapes to DVDs).

Any help would be appreciated!

Hi and welcome to the forum. Your best bet would be to hook up the coax output of the DISH secondary TV output to the DVD recorder's coax INPUT, then go from the DVD recorder's coax OUTPUT into the TV. If your DVD recorder has a built-in tuner, then be sure to do an "auto add" or "channel add" or "channel scan" with the DVD recorder's tuner set to "Antenna" (not cable) and with the DISH DVR powered on so the DVD recorder will discover and be able to tune into channel 60. To watch DISH, make sure the DVD recorder is on, and tuned to channel 60. Also make sure the TV is on and set to channel 3 or 4 corresponding to how you have set your DVD recorder to output the TV signal. Set this way, you should be able to watch DISH or put in a DVD and watch DVDs on your secondary TV.

If you now turn POWER OFF on the DVD recorder (but make sure the DISH box is still on), you can go over to your TV and tune in channel 60 and you should be able to watch DISH this way as well, with none of the other components on (just DISH box and TV). But remember to switch the TV back to channel 3 (or 4) when you want to watch something from the DVD recorder.

Note that the above set-up assumes you have a DVD recorder with a built-in analog tuner and coax inputs/outputs. If your DVD recorder has no tuner then set-up would be slightly different (basically just do coax pass-through and tune the signal into channel 60 on the TV directly).

As for hooking up the VCR to the DVD recorder, just use a set of those red/white/yellow composite video/stereo audio RCA cables between the VCR's OUTPUT and the DVD recorder's INPUT. When you want to view/record what's on the VCR, just switch the DVD recorder over to its LINE INPUT (might be line 1 or line 2, depending on how/where you plugged in the VCR).

Also keep in mind that if you are trying to record storebought VHS tapes to DVD, this will most likely fail (flashing light/dark picture) due to Macrovision copyguard encoded in the tapes. Home made tapes from TV or from a camcorder should copy over to DVD just fine though.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

-CB