In accord with embodiments and implementations consistent with the present invention, rather than perform a full scan of every frequency to find a channel, the tuner is programmed to find a reasonable sample of channels. For example, the tuner can search for at least two or three channels to determine the frequency plan of the channels (by virtue of detection of at least one channel) and then use one of the known plans to directly identify the frequency map. The process can then step quickly through each frequency, without optimizing or fine tuning each channel, to determine the existence of a channel. With this process the number of tunable channels is found quicker and the initial setup time is shortened. This abstract is not to be considered limiting, since other embodiments may deviate from the features described in this abstract.