Silicon Dust HomeRun: "No Signal"?

[PeteCress]

Got two Silicon Dust HomeRun tuner boxes (i.e. 4 tuners total).

Under SageTV | Watch LiveTV, I can tune channel 10.1, but channels 12.1, 12.2, and 12.3 all come up "No Signal".

No-brainer, right?

Not.

Reason: when I hop over to the PC right next to the SageTV server and fire up Silicon Dust's "TotalMedia" app to watch television, channels 12.1, 12.2, and 12.3 come in no problem. Ditto when tuning the converter box on the same coax as the HomeRuns.

"No Signal" across the board, I can see. Went through that a few days ago fooling around with my LAN/switches/router.

But some channels and not others - and the others tunable via another app?

I've run out of theories.

Anybody been here?


Ahhhh, the wonders of Windows.... I re-booted and it seems tb back to normal.

The question, however remains...

[gplasky]

What question? With the latest drivers multiple apps and PCs can all access the same HDHR. But what happens is the app will lock the tuner as it uses it. When it is done it still keeps a lock on it for I think 30 seconds. So if you're running 2 different apps and going between them testing the HDHR you may be running into that issue.

Gerry

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by gplasky

What question? With the latest drivers multiple apps and PCs can all access the same HDHR. But what happens is the app will lock the tuner as it uses it. When it is done it still keeps a lock on it for I think 30 seconds. So if you're running 2 different apps and going between them testing the HDHR you may be running into that issue.Gerry

Using the HomeRun utility, I checked the two boxes and saw that both tuners on one box were in use - yet no app was explicity using it.

I fired up my minimalist PC, and then shut down all three "real" PCs one-by-one. After the last PC shut down, both tuners were still in use.

Pulled the power plug on the problem tuner then plugged it back in. No tuners in use.

Then I brought up the three PCs one-by-one looking for one of the tuners tb in use. Nobody grabbed at them.... all 4 were not in use. I'm calling the "in use" with no PCs running a separate issue. Somebody, somehow never let go. Case closed.


Then I fired up the SageTV server. Once that was running, I turned on one of the HD200s and watched as one of the tuners became "In Use" (this is through the HomeRun utility running on my laptop). Sage reported "no signal" and indeed the signal strength/signal quality/symbol quality were very low. Like 5%/0%/0% for channel 10.1.

Turned off the HD200 that I was using to try to watch TV and saw the "In Use" immediately cleared.

Then I fired up Silicon Dust's "Total Media" app on one of the other PCs and watched a couple of channels (12.1 and 10.1). In both cases it used the same HomeRun box and in both cases signal strength/signal quality/symbol qualitywere good. e.g. 62%/91%/100% for channel 10.1.

Does the diff in quality numbers tell you anything?

The part about the same device being perceived by the monitor utility (different computer from Sage and from the TotalMedia viewer) depending on whether Sage was using it or TotalMedia was using it has my attention.

I'm thinking some kind of LAN/cable/switch issue but don't know enough to go further.

First question in my mind is how does the utility on the laptop decide what the signal strength/sisgnal quality/symbol quality numbers are? Maybe the tuner box keeping track of how many packets got acknowledged or something?

Second question would be who is accessing the tuners? SageTV or the HD200. If it's a connection issue, that would tell me which wires to start looking at.


And here's an addendum:

When Sage its using one tuner box at very low percents (with the other box unplugged) and I unplug the box in use, power up the other box, and then change channels on the HD200 there is a tendency for Sage to pick up the channel on the newly-powered box at good numbers. e.g. 84/81/100.

But when I change to the next channel, the numbers drop to "no signal". Yet I can change back to the "good" channel and the numbers come back to the higher numbers and the channel is rendered.

My head is starting to hurt... -)