About
Contact
Feedback
Clients
Reviews
Articles

Cable Frequencies for NTL Analogue in Leicester

By Richard Bland, Combined Effort Consulting, 12 Aug 2004.

Overview
This page is intended to document the frequencies used by NTL for services provided on their analogue cable lines. I live in Leicester, therefore the freqencies are certainly correct for 'my street', but YMMV.

I use a Hauppauge PVR-250 under Linux using the IVTV driver. Ultimately, I want to use MythTV or Freevo and a backend PVR solution and maybe an XBox as a frontend, next to the TV.

Before I could expect Freevo / MythTV to record via the PVR-250, I needed to find what frequencies NTL operated it's channels over. I could not find this information on Google and the frequencies documented in the Frequencies.pm Perl module in the IVTV CVS on SourceForge did not match what NTL were broadcasting on. I'm assuming this is down to NTL using 'non-standard' frequencies on their analogue cable line?

How the frequencies were found
The hard way. Once I could dd data from /dev/video0 to a file, I created a BASH script to loop through the frequencies from 1250 to 999250 in 1000Mhz intervals, dumping a 5 second MPEG sample to file. I then created another BASH script to play these back through mplayer. I turned up the volume and did something else whilst it trawled though the MPEG files. If I 'heard voices', I made a note of the frequency and guessed the channel. Obviously, this is dodgy solution if you like quiet television.

The Frequency Table

Frequency Channel
136250Box
159250Sky One
175250Cartoon Network
320250CNN
336250Sky News
455250QVC
479250five
495250Channel 4
511250ITV1
527250BBC2
543250BBC1
551250NTL Radio

Good Luck
Since I jumped 1000Mhz at a time, I may have missed some channels. Drop me a line if you know of any other frequencies. I picked 250 as the suffix for the frequency since this seemed to be the most common value in Frequencies.pm.

About the Author
Richard Bland is the Senior Software Engineer at Combined Effort Consulting Limited. Richard is based in Leicester, UK and has worked in the IT Industry for over 10 years, specialising in Database, Web and Win32 development.