Students living in residential housing at CSUCI will find a conveniently located television wall jack in each bedroom. This cable TV connection is always live, and currently includes a variety of 60 channels of programming. To help you enjoy this television service, please consider the following information when preparing to move into Santa Cruz or Anacapa Village:
Before coming to campus, be sure to pack the following items to make your experience with CSUCI cable TV an easy one:The CSUCI Student Housing Cable TV system allows residents to simply and directly connect their televisions to the cable outlet in each residence hall room. CSUCI in conjunction with Dish Network insures that there is a good signal at the wall jack when students arrive. It is the individual user's responsibility to have working equipment and to do any required setup of their equipment (which is where the appropriate user manuals come in.) Below, you will find basic information on connecting and setting up your television for proper operation on the CSUCI Student Housing Cable TV system.
Connecting a television set to the CSUCI Cable system is an easy process, but one that may be new to many students. The best way to insure your ability to start enjoying your CSUCI Cable TV service right away is to bring along the User’s Manual for your television and other related equipment. CSUCI Student Housing and CSUCI IT staff are not able to provide setup assistance for television service, so it is important to have a manual to help you figure out how to set up your TV.
Since we understand that some students may not have the owner's manual, we have compiled this short primer to aid students in resolving their individual connections to the CSUCI Student Housing Cable TV System.
A 75-ohm coaxial ("coax") cable with “F” style connectors is what you will be using to connect your television to the cable outlet found on your wall. It is absolutely necessary that the cable be a known working cable. As with any cord, it is very important that the cord be maintained properly. Do not string the cord taut across your room or stretch it beyond its limits. This could cause damage to the cord, the end connectors, to your equipment and the wall outlet as well. Local retailers (Target, Wal-Mart, Radio Shack, Home Depot and Fry’s Electronics, to name a few) sell coax cables in various lengths. If you need a longer or shorter cord, they are widely available for purchase. We recommend the purchase and usage of cables that use SCREW TYPE HEX CONNECTORS. Do not purchase "push-on" coaxial cables since they are more likely to fall off your wall or equipment jack. To prevent damage, do not pinch the coax cable behind or under furniture or rugs. Also make sure that the bare copper wire in the end of your coax cable is straight, and not bent over. You may find cables in RG-6 or RG-59 size. RG-6 is preferred, but RG-59 will work fine. The color of the cable does not matter, but you will typically find them available in black or white
Most modern television sets are capable of receiving signals from several different input jacks built into their cabinets. A careful examination of your TV set should enable you to locate the proper jack to connect your coaxial cable to. The input jack that you are looking for on your television should look just like the jack that is on the wall of your room. This is the “F” style coaxial cable connector.
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(This is a photo of an “F” style connector in a wall plate. What you will see in your room and on your television will look similar to the jack that is shown here, except it will most likely be silver in color.) |
If your television is CABLE-READY (Note: “Cable-ready” means your television set has a built in tuner capable of tuning in the channels available on your cable system. If you are unsure, read the owner's manual to see if your set is cable-ready), the back of the set should look like some variation of the following diagrams:
 1. One connection "ANT IN" Or "ANTENNA" or “ANTENNA/CABLE IN” If this is the case, plug one end of your coax cable into the "ANT IN", “ANTENNA”, or “ANTENNA/CABLE IN” connection and the other end into the cable outlet on the wall. | |
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(Circled in red) “F” Style Coaxial Connector: “Antenna/Cable In” |
2. Two connections "ANT IN" and "CABLE" If this is the case, plug one end of your coax cable into the "CABLE" connection and the other end into the cable outlet on the wall.
3. One connection or two connections "ANT IN" and "CABLE" and/or a switch-- that can look like:
After you have appropriately connected both ends of the coax cable (one end to the wall, one end to the TV set) there is just a little bit more preparation required before you can watch your favorite shows. In order to operate properly on the CSUCI Student Housing Television System, your television will have to be setup to serve as the tuner for all of the available cable stations by putting it into Cable TV mode. This is a setting that can typically be found in an onscreen menu. Follow this procedure:
Once you have put your television into the “Cable TV Mode”, the television will need to scan the cable to see what channels are available. There are two ways that this typically happens:
Be aware that every television set takes a varying length of time to run through an Autoscan sequence. Some sets can take 30 minutes or more to complete a scan, whereas other models can finish a scan in just a few moments. The key here is to be patient and let the process finish. If you interrupt the process because you get tired of waiting, you will likely have to run it again to capture all 60 available channels. Once your set has successfully completed a scan of available channels, you should not have to go through this procedure again until such time as you put the television on a different signal source in a different location. Even if you lose power sometime during your semester, the TV should still remember where all the channels are located.
