Few Channels Fuzzy

[kuch68]

I am new to the HTPC world and have recently put together my first attempt (components listed in signature). I am having a couple problems that I am slowly resolving by searching through the forums (Hauppauge Remote loses focus etc). I have one perplexing problem with only a couple channels:

Only channels 2 - 4 come in as very fuzzy (lot of static). It looks like the old days where the antenna wasn't picking up the signal correctly. If I route the same piece of cable into my tv I get a good picture.

As soon as I go to channel 5 and up they all look good, with the exception I need to do some tunning for better color, accuracy etc. Has anyone seen this before, or know what it could be? I have analog cable and the output from the video card is s-video into CRT TV.

thanks

[Para]

It might be that the cards have a weak signal or need to be fine tuned for those channels or maybe just interference.

The "fine tuning" of the PVR150 and PVR500 cards can be done for picture and sound. One adjustment handles both sound and picture.

You can run a forum search for "fine tuning" or you can look at my early posts for how I fine tuned my cards for sound issues. Here is a quick link to one I found http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...0&postcount=23
You don't have to make large frequency adjustments in the registry to get improvements.

[kuch68]

Para....Good Thread. I got through it and I believe I have a pretty good understanding of fine tuning. I installed wintv(2000) and let it search through the channels. I then went in and tried to fine tune in either direction. The signal got better, but still had a lot of static. I could never get the channels to look much better in winTV. Does this point to a source issue? Perhaps my cable signal is strong enough to look good on the TV but not on the TV card? I am going to try to move the card to my other PCI port to see if that fixes anything.

If that doesn't work, what would you suggest next?

thanks again.

[Para]

kuch68,
Looks like you are on the right path.

You can try-out or look for the following:
1) Change PCI slots
2) Look for loose cable connections
3) Reduce number of splitters in cable line
4) Look for electrical noise – some system fans, fan speed controls, and even power supplies, can be a source of noise.