Unit Test RxJS Observable.timer using typescript, karma and jasmine

Hi I'm relatively new to Angular2, Karma and Jasmine. Currently I'm using Angular 2 RC4 Jasmine 2.4.x I have an Angular 2 service which periodically calls an http service like this:

getDataFromDb() { return Observable.timer(0, 2000).flatMap(() => {
        return this.http.get(this.backendUrl)
            .map(this.extractData)
            .catch(this.handleError);
    });
}

Now I want to test the functionality. For testing purposes I have just tested the "http.get" on a separate function without the Observable.timer by doing:

const mockHttpProvider = {
    deps: [MockBackend, BaseRequestOptions],
    useFactory: (backend: MockBackend, defaultOptions: BaseRequestOptions) => {
        return new Http(backend, defaultOptions);
    }
}

describe('data.service test suite', () => {
    var dataFromDbExpected: any;

    beforeEachProviders(() => {
        return [
            DataService,
            MockBackend,
            BaseRequestOptions,
            provide(Http, mockHttpProvider),
        ];
    });

    it('http call to obtain data',
        inject(
            [DataService, MockBackend],
            fakeAsync((service: DataService, backend: MockBackend) => {
                backend.connections.subscribe((connection: MockConnection) => {
                    dataFromDbExpected =  'myData';
                    let mockResponseBody: any = 'myData';
                    let response = new ResponseOptions({ body: mockResponseBody });
                    connection.mockRespond(new Response(response));

                });
                const parsedData$ = service.getDataFromDb()
                    .subscribe(response => {
                        console.log(response);
                        expect(response).toEqual(dataFromDbExpected);
                    });
            })));
});

I obviously want to test the whole function with the Observable.timer. I think one might want to use the TestScheduler from the rxjs framework, but how can I tell to only repeat the timer function for x times? I couln't find any documentation using it in the typescript context.