Jul 09 2010

AlmaTV Analogue Frequencies

Category: KazakhstanChrisM @ 11:54 pm

I fully realise that this post will attract (if at all) somewhat of a niche audience, however if this information had been available previously, I would have saved a lot of time, and not got quite so bored and frustrated with various technical hitches.

Anyway, the following information will be of use if…
You subscribe to AlmaTV’s cable package
You are in Astana (I’m assuming other cities may have different frequencies in use?)
You want to watch their channels via a TV capture card on your PC (to pause live TV, record programs, timeshift etc.)
Your TV card’s program(s) autoscan feature either fails to pick up some channels, or simply refuses to work at all.

If you meet the conditions above, the frequencies and (approximate) channels names below should help you tune in. Don’t forget that if you are watching the analogue broadcasts of channels, you won’t be able to switch languages – there is only one audio stream, unless of course you have a Digital Cable TV card amd can therefore pick up the digital broadcasts (mine covers analogue aerial, DVB-S, DVB-S2 and DVB-T, but digital cable didn’t get included.)

If you are scanning for channels and find that less than 69 or so appear, you may want to tell your TV card software program that you are in Australia, and scan for cable channels. At least in a couple of applications, this made it check the frequencies with smaller gaps between each potential station location. You may then end up with problems hearing or locking onto the sound. Most likely this is a problem with variant of PAL used on cable channels with Alma TV and whatever they use in Australia. If you’re lucky, you can set Australia to pick up all the channels, and then maybe edit each channel afterwards with to use PAL I/G/M/whatever they are using here.

The frequencies are all in Hz, and I’ve written the channel names in Latin characters, rather than Cyrillic as this blog still won’t display non-Latin alphabets. Where feasible I have included what the channel name looks like on the screen by representing Cyrillic letters with Latin ones. Please don’t cringe too much Oleg, if you’re reading this 🙂

If you are entering these frequencies into your programs manually, you may find you need to fine tune them a little, and don’t forget if the TV program accepts frequencies in KHz to knock three zeros off the end of each figure, if MHz is required, just move the decimal places three steps further left. So 109250000 Hz is 109250 Khz or 109.25 MHz.

83250000 to 85250000 Asil Arna (somewhere between the two figures, different programs locked onto different areas)
109250000 Khabar
119250000 El Arna
151250000 Hit TV
165250000 Rahat (Paxat, though logo shows (CTB (STV)) bad quality signal
175250000 Channel 31 (Logo looks like 3U)
191250000 Astana
199250000 Channel 7
215250000 KTK
231250000 Muzzine (Can’t seem to find this one on digital cable)
238250000 1 Eurasia
247250000 NTV (HTB)
253250000 Ren TV (PEH TV)
271250000 RTR Planet (PTP – Russia is show in logo)
287250000 NTK (HTK)
295250000 RTR Planet (PTP – Russia is show in logo) – better quality maybe
303250000 RBK
319250000 TV-3 (TB3)
327250000 TV 1000
335250000 TV-1000 Russian Cinema (Pycckoe Kino)
343250000 Our Cinema (NTV Hawe Kino)
351250000 Home (?) Cinema (Dom Kino)
359250000 TV-ts (TVCI u)
367250000 Mnogo TV
399250000 India TV
503250000 Comedy (Komydiya)
511250000 Feniks+ Cinema (Kino)
527250000 TV-1000 Action
543250000 AXN Sci Fi Ru
559250000 Fox Life
567250000 National Geographic
583250000 Animal Planet
591250000 Discovery Channel
599250000 Discovery Science
607250000 Viasat Explorer
615250000 Viasat History
623250000 Eurosport-2
639250000 Eurosport-1
647250000 Sport 1
655250000 Sport 2
663250000 Alma TV Info
671250000 Drive
679250000 Boxing Channel
687250000 Jetix
695250000 Cartoon Network
703250000 Nickelodeon
711250000 Universal Channel Russia
719250000 TellyNana
727250000 Muzika Channel 1
735250000 Muz TV (My3 TB)
743250000 Mezzo
751250000 MTV Russia
759250000 TDK
767250000 Mir
775250000 Nostalgia
783250000 Hunting & Fishing
791250000 Summer House (Gardening etc.)
799250000 Health TV
807250000 Cooking TV
815250000 World Fashion
823250000 TNV (THB)
831250000 Spas
839250000 KZ. Sport1
847250000 Comedy TV
855250000 Euronews

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May 19 2010

The Years Aren’t So Kind To Some

Category: PicturesChrisM @ 11:15 pm

So, below we have three images, see if you can guess who they are…

Exhibit A

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Exhibit B

Exhibit C

Exhibit C

If you are still wondering (I will assume you don’t live in Britain if the last two stumped you), click the read more link below for a few more faces

Continue reading “The Years Aren’t So Kind To Some”

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Mar 27 2010

Irina and I are on the train d…

Category: TweetsChrisM @ 4:39 pm

Irina and I are on the train down to Falmouth to see Nick (bro) & Roz.
They had a baby boy a couple of days ago!
HUGE congrats to them 🙂

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Mar 21 2010

Apologies to regular blog read…

Category: TweetsChrisM @ 1:38 am

Apologies to regular blog readers, normal posting will resume in a fortnight.Sorting things in UK taking a lot of time.Best of luck2Nick&Roz

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Mar 13 2010

Went 4 walk earlier, fed the d…

Category: Anna's Photos,TweetsChrisM @ 1:45 am

Went 4 walk earlier, fed the ducks with Anna, Ira and Dad. Nick has since arrived – good luck to him for tomorrow! http://twitpic.com/185dey

Anna Feeding The Ducks

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Jan 29 2010

Ivory – Take Action Now | IFAW…

Category: TweetsChrisM @ 7:30 pm

Ivory – Take Action Now | IFAW UK http://bit.ly/684jdM – Thanks to my brother Nick for the heads up. Takes 20 seconds to sign the petition.

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Jan 03 2010

Family Photos

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 6:31 pm

Head on over to this post at John’s Celt Photographic blog to see some very recent photos of Mum, John, Nick and Roz enjoying New Year.

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Dec 14 2009

No Travel, A Lot Of Food And Drink

Category: Friends,PersonalChrisM @ 4:45 pm

So Christmas is drawing near, and this will be the first year we won’t be back in Britain for the celebrations. Although I have mixed feelings on the subject, our finances meant that a trip home to Anna’s Nana, Dad (Welsh word) Kav, Grandad, Nick and Roz etc. will have to wait for a few more months. On the plus side, we’re hoping to meet up with some friends over here, both at the crossover point of Christmas Eve into Christmas Day, and also for Christmas Day itself, where Anna can play with (or at least alongside 🙂 ) some other children.
Irina is planning to bake a couple more Death By Chocolate cakes, so we have no need to try importing some Mr Kipling treats. There are apparently some vodka bottles in the freezer that need finishing off, I’ve recently managed to convince myself that beer isn’t so bad after all, and Inessa seems to have a lovely meal planned. Despite the fact that three families with children will be combining forces for Christmas Day dinner, I think we’re all relaxed enough to fit in with each other’s plans and/or traditions, and as one of the men already put it, “relax, get drunk and eat too much” seems to be the order of the day anyway 🙂

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Dec 14 2009

Alma TV Initial Report

Category: Kazakhstan,PersonalChrisM @ 5:23 am

As promised, here are my first impressions of Alma TV’s cable service here in Astana.

I’ll lay out the details first – we asked for and got the digital service (apparently not available in all areas just yet), didn’t get their internet service (not available in our location), and already had all the cabling in place for them. Our flat has already had a normal TV aerial wired in from the roof, as well as a large sat dish pointed at the Hotbird satellite. Not wanting to lose the satellite channels, we opted to use the standard aerial leads to feed the cable signal into the flat. As this lead is already split to feed a socket by the TV and also by the PC, this means we can watch two different cables channels at the same time. As long as one is Russian language – more on that later.

So, we went for the Prestige package, which basically means all of the channels except for three or four extra sports ones are included.

The channels that are mainly in English are as follows

    Discovery Channel
    Discovery Science
    Discovery World
    Discovery Travel & Living
    AXN Sci Fi Ru
    Sci Fi Channel
    Fox Life
    Fox Crime
    Universal Channel Russia
    SET Russia
    TV-1000
    TV-1000 Action
    National Geographic
    National Geographic Wild
    Animal Planet
    Zone Reality
    Viasat Explorer
    Viasat History
    MGM
    Hallmark
    ESPN
    BBC World
    CNN
    Euronews
    Bloomberg
    Cartoon Network / Turner Classic Movies
    Nickelodeon
    Jetix
    VH-1 Europe
    World Fashion
    Fashion TV
    Luxe TV

The following channels are either in Russian or another language, but might still be of interest…

    Sport 1
    Sport 2
    Eurosport
    Russian Extreme – different extreme or unusual sports
    Drive – Motor related programs
    Box – Fight channel, different disciplines covered
    Play TV (seems to be KZ KZSport1)
    MCM – French music channel
    MTV Russia – You can probably guess from the name 🙂
    A-One – Another Russian music channel
    Mus TV – Another Russian music channel
    Hit TV – Not sure yet about which country this channels originates from
    Music Pervogo – Another Russian music channel
    Mezzo – Classical/Jazz/Non-pop music channel

English audio doesn’t actually mean that all programs will have English speech. If you have a program that involves interviewing people from other countries, their speech is left intact – the English dubbing you’d get from watching the same channel in Britain is lost. Also adverts are mostly in Russian – no great loss there 🙂

Some channels have their EPG (Electronic Program Guide) two hours off – that is to say if you want to find out what is on now or next, you’ll need to check what the cable box thought was on two hours ago. Not all channels are like this, and I’m fairly certain it would be simple for Alma TV to correct this mistake.

The program names are mostly in Russian, but if you can at least read the Cyrillic alphabet, then you can just say the words out loud, and normally guess what it might be about. Channels that are specifically themed (SciFi, Discovery channels and sports for example) are normally easy to guess.

The interface menu for the cable STB (set top box) was originally in Russian, but can be changed to English. Our installers knew Russian wasn’t my first language, so they swapped the language for us (Menu, 1, Left until you see English, OK and then a few Exits), and also altered the relevant channels from Russian to English audio. Though not all of them, which is why I’ve listed all the ones I could find above, in case you ever find yourself using a digital set top box post-install time.

The box has both composite video and S-Video outputs, but obviously no component, HDMI or VGA. The audio is covered with both analogue RCA stereo output, and digital.

If your area isn’t yet covered by the digital service, you can still get most (all?) of those channels, but only with Russian audio (BBC/CNN excepted).

The ANNUAL rental for the box is around 750 Tenge (that is around 3 UK pounds, or $5!), and the monthly charge depends on which channel package you go for. I’ll have to double check with Irina, but I think the Prestige package (as DanD rightly pointed out, Kazakhstan HAD to have a channel package called that!) costs around 4000 Tenge per month.

I’ll try to post more information as it arises.

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Nov 28 2009

Clothes Flowers, Camera, Friends And Gwen

Category: Friends,VideosChrisM @ 11:48 pm

In this video, shot on the 5th of May, you can see the brilliant present that Nick and Roz sent for Anna – a baby clothes bouquet. You’ll need to trawl through May’s posts to see the various pictures of it. We also have the preparations for a photo shoot, where Anna’s little feet were cradled in some big hands, and surprisingly enough, given that this was shot in Clydach, you’ll also see Gwen popping up 🙂
By the way the camera belongs to, and the main photographer is John, we weren’t using his studio as the garage was too cold for Anna, and the nice man you see in the kitchen is Kevin, who was very helpful, as ever.

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