TV tuners in Sage vs. built-in TV tuner

[pzasso]

I have mentioned in other threads that I have (3) HVR-950 USB tuner sticks attached to my SageTV server. They work fine with the local stations, and I am not having any issues. I have a 80 inch boom antenna on the roof that has a pretty good shot at the majority of the towers which are about 35 miles away.

If I jump over to the tuner that is built-in to my HDTV, I can actually pick up stations that are even further away, and they are clear. The signal strength according to the utility built-in to the TV says they are coming in at about 60 to 65%, yet I am not able to pull these in very well when using Sage.

I realize that the HVR-950 tuners might be the issue here, but I tried this with an HDHomerun as well, since they claim they have a better tuner than what comes with your TV. I didn't find the HDHomerun to be any better than the HVR-950 in this case.

I live 30 miles East of Sacramento, and I am able to pick up stations near San Francisco with my built-in tuner in my Insignia TV, so now that I have seen that I can pull them in clearly, I really want to be able to pull them in with Sage.

I am looking for any tweaks that might be out there, or advice on a different tuner than what I currently have tested.

Thanks,

--Paul

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by pzasso

I have mentioned in other threads that I have (3) HVR-950 USB tuner sticks attached to my SageTV server. They work fine with the local stations, and I am not having any issues. I have a 80 inch boom antenna on the roof that has a pretty good shot at the majority of the towers which are about 35 miles away.

If I jump over to the tuner that is built-in to my HDTV, I can actually pick up stations that are even further away, and they are clear. The signal strength according to the utility built-in to the TV says they are coming in at about 60 to 65%, yet I am not able to pull these in very well when using Sage.

I realize that the HVR-950 tuners might be the issue here, but I tried this with an HDHomerun as well, since they claim they have a better tuner than what comes with your TV. I didn't find the HDHomerun to be any better than the HVR-950 in this case.

I live 30 miles East of Sacramento, and I am able to pick up stations near San Francisco with my built-in tuner in my Insignia TV, so now that I have seen that I can pull them in clearly, I really want to be able to pull them in with Sage.

I am looking for any tweaks that might be out there, or advice on a different tuner than what I currently have tested.

Thanks,

--Paul

How are you splitting your atenna signal? Are you using an amplier? My HD Homerun is just as good at receiving OTA signals (if not better), so I am wondering if you have split your signal too much by the time they get to the 950's (or the HDHomerun).

[pzasso]

From the roof antenna, the RG6 comes straight down the wall, with no breaks and into the house where I have a channel master signal booster with 1 input port and two output ports. One of the out ports goes to the back of the TV and the other goes to a 3 way spliter. The cable length from the second out port to the splitter is very short, and I used high quality cable as well as good connectors. I think the booster is adding and a 12db boost to each output port.

As a test I took 1 of the 3 runs that go to my HVR-950s and ran it to the back of the TV, and it was not any worse. I even ran the antenna wire from outside directly to one of the HVR-950's with no booster or spliter and it seems to be the same.

I really don't think Sage is the issue here, but I did notice that my TV works pretty hard to tune the channel. By that I mean with the signal indicator utility built into the TV, it appears to get stronger if I stay on that station for 10 or more seconds, and the signal appears to increase and not drop to what it was when I first tuned to that channel, maybe by 7% or so. It still jumps around a bit, but it doesn't dip to what it was when I first tuned to that channel.

I have not tried hooking the HDHomerun directly to the antenna, with no splitters or boosters,so I will try that next.

Is there anything else I should be doing to boost the signal or setup differntly as far as my antenna, cabling etc?

I guess I could go with a 180 inch huge antenna on the roof if you think that would help? Not sure if that is necessary for HD reception, which is all I am after at this point.

Thanks,

--Paul

[sic0048]

How new/old is the TV? I suspect it is simply the different tuners being used in the setup. Your TV tuner must be better at picking up those long distance stations. Obviously not splitting the signal helps the TV, but your tests prove that isn't the problem overall.

I've had about 5 different HD tuners (2 different HD TVs and three computer related) and they all showed different abilities in pulling in signals and consistant signal strength. For me, generally the newer the tuner, the better it was at pulling in the signals - a clear a sign that HD tuners are getting better with time.

The HDHomeRun has a pretty good tuner, especially when compared to many other computer tuner cards, but I think the last generation or two of TVs have an even better tuner than the HDHomeRun. My Sharp lc46d64u has a better tuner than the HDHomeRun I believe.

[pzasso]

After trying a bunch of different things, including installing a high powered Winegard preamp at the top of the antenna, I have come to the conclusion that amplifying the signal does not work well with the HVR-950's or the HDHomerun. It made a huge difference on the TV tuners ability to pull in the signal since all of the channels were coming in at 92% or above on my Insignia TV, which is about 2 months old, but it actually made reception worse on the 950s and the HDHomerun. Although the HDHomerun showed all channels at 100%, it could not display any of them. I think it was getting over powered by the preamp.

Running the HVR-950's and the HDHomerun with no boost at all was not that great either, so I ended up going with a small boost 12db, and spillting a few times after that. The TV tuner still does a much better job of pulling in the stations, but I am out of ideas at this point.

--Paul

[paulbeers]

Everyone had their "this is how I fixed my OTA reception stories"...but I will give you mine.

I live about 10 miles from most of the towers in my area. All of which are strong with the exception of ABC. Because of the ABC reception, I decided to go to a whole house antenna (80+ inch). Unfortunately my reception was horrible! ABC came in nice, but FOX as unwatchable and NBC and CBS were borderline. I had the big attennae running to an 8 port SVI amplifier and then out to my computer and various other televisions. I then switched to a basic set of rabit ears and all was perfect (with the exception of ABC). What the heck? How could a cheap 15 dollar set of RCA rabit ears be better? It was a two fold issue, over amplification (the big antenna was pulling in too good of a signal and causing my tuners to get too strong of a signal) and my attenna appeared to be catching too many waves at various peaks and valleys so that I was getting a "dirty" signal. Now I use my basic rabbit ears for the HDHomerun for tuning CBS, NBC, and FOX and I use my Fusion5 Lite to solely tune ABC. The Homerun Config (I believe) software has the ability for you to manually tune a tuner. It will then give you 3 different "bars" having to do with your signal. The way I diagnosed my problem is that Signal Strength was 100%, but the Signal Quality was all over the board (for all stations but ABC). This is how I knew I was getting a "dirty signal"....

Moral of the story: OTA reception is a crap shoot at best. Sometimes you need to play with combinations before you get something that works.

Use antennaweb.org. You may have to use multiple antennas and luckily with the HDHomerun you can tune different lineups with each tuner.