If you are interested in some low cost tuners you can buy a
whole tuner and demod assembly. It has a wealth of useable
modules. I think 35,000 are available.

Go to the following web address

http://www.lasermotion.com/RFCOMPONENTS.htm

Norman Gillaspie

"PC-Sat provides quality Usenet Newshosting and Newsfeeds for ISP and
Corporations. Interested see www.pc-sat.com"

> -----Original Message-----
> From: pic microcontroller discussion list
> [mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]On Behalf Of Andy Kunz
> Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 1999 5:13 AM
> To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
> Subject: Re: Cheap TV3/4 tuners?
>
>
> At 03:09 PM 1/26/99 -0600, you wrote:
> >Does anyone know of any cheap tuners for television sets (dedicated
> >channel 3/4 is fine)?  There exist many gizmos for short-range video
> >transmission, but they all output RF-modulated video only.  I suspect
> >their design does the audio modulation at the transmitter, and so the
> >receiving box never has a baseband video signal.  Putting a tuner on
> >the output, though, should allow the use of the transmit/receive pair
> >as a relatively high-bandwidth data link.  Does anyone know of any
> >cheap tuners that would be suitable for such a purpose?
>
> Tuners are available from a variety of sources.
>
> If you are looking for 3/4 output, these are usually "down-converters"
> rather than "tuners."  The difference is that a down-converter basically
> moves a frequency block (often 20MHz or more wide) from it's original
> location down to the desired band you want.  You can tell a down-converter
> because if you tune to say, channel 3 of its output, you can also see a
> (often good) picture on channels 2 and 4.  This has caused me problems,
> thinking I had a bug :-(
>
> A tuner, on the other hand, tunes the specified channel, converting it to
> IF (then baseband if you have a video out).  If it has channel 3/4 output,
> it is then re-modulated to the appropriate frequency.
>
> Both of these are fairly common.  I've worked with Mitsumi, Alps, Philips,
> and others.  Many of them use I2C bus interface, many use SPI.  It isn't
> hard to find what you are looking for.
>
> I might have one laying around that I can spare.  What are you making?
>
> Andy
>
>    \-----------------/
>     \     /---\     /
>      \    |   |    /          Andy Kunz
>       \   /---\   /           Montana Design
> /---------+   +---------\     http://www.montanadesign.com
> | /  |----|___|----|  \ |
> \/___|      *      |___\/     Go fast, turn right,
>                                and keep the wet side down!
>