Fixing problem by re-seating CableCard

Archived from groups: alt.tv.tech.hdtv (More info?)

Well, here's a CableCard experience to store away in your memory files for
someday when you might need to try it.

Friday night, I turned on the TV -- Sony KDF-60XS955 with cable card
interface to Time-Warner Cable -- to find an error warning box onscreen:
"Error 161-6." Further instructions said that I should report this error #
to my cable company. When I went through the channels, I found that the
only HDTV channels that worked were the local affiliate stations. No HDTV
tier, no ESPNHD. Some of the other digital channels that I sampled were
also out, such as the digital music-only channels, but others were OK. All
of the analog channels seemed to be fine.

One or two of the HDTV channels popped in and out, i.e., there would be a
picture, then it would freeze, then pixelization and gone, but for the most
part they were gone. I did watch part of a football game on the local CBS
affiliate in HD which looked great. The error box would come up each time
the TV was turned on.

I called Time-Warner Cable and described the problem, gave them the error
code. The two tech support people I talked to on the phone professed great
ignorance about CableCard in general. They seemed to be completely
untrained about it; I knew a lot more than they did. They arranged for a
tech to come to my home on Tuesday AM. Tech Support's ignorance was so
great that one of them told me that the reason I was not getting the HDTV
tier or ESPNHD was because you had to have a cable box to get them -- you
could not get them with a one-way cable card. This, of course, was
completely wrong -- we have been watching all those stations for a couple of
weeks.

Anyway, after all this was over, my wife -- who is a computer whiz -- made a
suggestion: Turn off the TV, remove the cable card & re-seat it. See what
happens. Said when you had problems with PCMCIA cards -- which is what the
CableCard is -- the first thing to try is to simply remove and re-seat it.
Said she didn't know why that worked, but it often did. Perhaps just erases
its memory.

In any case, I turned off the TV, took out the CableCard, put it back in and
turned the TV back on. No error messages and all the HDTV and other digital
channels were all back looking great. 12 hours later, still no problem.
Can't predict the future but, for the short term, re-seating the CableCard
fixed everything.

When I had a cable box, one of the first solutions Time-Warner tech support
would offer over the phone was "unplug your cable box and plug it back in".
That would reset the box and often fix the problem. Seems that the
CableCard equivalent should have been their advice to me in this case, but
they were so abysmally ignorant they didn't even know how the card worked!

mack
austin