As a supplement to the main off-the-air HDTV Channel Map I've created this unencrypted channel listing for Canadian users who receive Rogers cable and would like to make the most of their equipment.

Increasingly, modern television devices are including QAM-enabled tuners, which basically means that they can receive digital cable channels alongside traditional analog ones. Yes, these are the same stations that you’d be getting when you rent a digital cable box from Rogers. In the US, there’s a small credit card sized device called a “Cable Card” that plugs into the back of almost all recent QAM-enabled televisions or set-top-boxes that allows them to tune encrypted pay TV channels, directly from within the device, without needing to rent a full fledged cable box from the cable company (most cable operators do charge a nominal fee to rent the Cable Card, along with appropriate fees for actual programming). Up in Canada, Rogers does not yet support Cable Cards – even though their network is compatible and an ever-larger number of Canadian televisions are including a Cable Card slot.

Rogers used to offer a modicum of free unencrypted (ClearQAM) channels that could be received by any QAM-enabled tuner, made up of basic Canadian stations such as CBC, CTV, Global, CityTV and E! channels from across the country. However, in July of 2007 the company decided to encrypting these channels, meaning that they can no longer be received by anything except the official Rogers cable box. Apparently, Rogers found the popularity of QAM-enabled televisions an annoyance and decided that even that meager selection of "free" Canadian content could not be tolerated.

So, for now, here’s a list of everything that’s left, primarily made up of music and radio channels. This should be accurate for Rogers Cable in the Greater Toronto Area but may not reflect Rogers digital offerings in other areas. When doing your own scans, you can tell when you’ve hit a QAM channel by its number – basically it will be in the format of ##.#, such as 83.45 or 102.346. Note that some QAM tuners renumber the subchannels, for example 82.7 and 82.8 may show as 82.1 and 82.2.

If you'd like to comment on this list, please see its official post in our forum.