I yesterday added a second three tuner Silicondust HD Homerun Prime cablecard tuner to my system, using a second cablecard and tuning resolver picked up from Ware Court. The activation phone call this time went well and within minutes my cablecard was showing authorized. However, repeated channel scans for the new tuner, identical to my existing tuner, showed just 65 channels (unencrypted) available instead of the 431 found for my package by the other tuner. Attempting to start a channel that was not showing available produced a "channel not subscribed" message. However in the log it showed:
20130411-00:03:50 CableCARD: Tuner0: vchannel 729 access = subscribed
20130411-00:03:55 CableCARD: Tuner0: vchannel 729 access = not-subscribed
i.e. it first said the channel was subscribed, then that it was not.
Since the webpages for the cablecard and tuning resolver were showing identical successful authorizations to my other tuner/card combo I started to think it must be a hardware issue until I found the following in a post on Silicondust's excellent forum:
"When it shows subscribed, then not-subscribed 5 seconds later, that means that the CableCARD hasn't been staged correctly. Usually they need to do a hard reset on the CableCARD to get it staged. After that, they may or may not need to send a refresh to the card to update it with the correct channel authorizations. In some cases, they actually have to take the card off the account, reassign it to inventory, then pull it back out and readd to your account, and set everything up again. Depending on the provider, they may just keep swapping cards till they find one that has already been staged. The card will lose its staging if it sits on the shelf for too long, and apparently the exact process to correct that isn't well known among cable provider support people."
I called up TWC again, asked for level 3 support and after they assured me that everything looked fine from their end and that it must be my problem in setup or hardware I read them this and they then went off and did an RHT(?) hit and a regular hit and asked me to try another scan. Although there was no change in the logs or device webpages when I did this the missing channels began pouring in and all is well...
Moral is that even when it looks like everything is good from your end and their end, it's still likely that your problems will be resolved by TWC reinitializing or whatever you can persuade them to do. Meantime, I now have my own 6 tuner/1.5TB whole house DVR system and it is great. My DVR boxes are gathering dust until my pricelock ends.