RWild
Them Or Us
Premium
join:2003-09-15
Cary, NC
 ·AT&T Southeast
·Windstream
 ·Comcast
·RoadRunner Cable
| Digital Tuner and Software Wierdness I am currently trying to use two digital tuners with identical antennas. One is a digital/analogue hybrid tuner built-in to an HP HDX9100 (Vista Ultimate 64) and the other is an ATI DTV Wonder card (digital/analogue) in a Dell Precision Workstation 530 (WinXP Pro 32).
The antennas are RadioShack UHF/VHF rotating, amplified devices with signal strengths optimized for each channel using preset rotations stored in the antennas.
On the HP:
It came with HP QuickPlay and MS MediaCenter. Both programs find only the primary channels. Several available digital stations broadcast two or three channels (e.g., PBS has 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3). Why is this?
QuickPlay finds only the strongest primary channels and consistently displays them - no intermittent loss. MediaCenter finds about twice as many primary channels during a scan but many are too weak to display at all (changing the antenna position does affect strength on these weak channels so it apparently really does see them). Many of the nearby channels (less than 20 miles) have intermittent reception - same hardware as /w QuickPlay which has consistent display. Why is this?
On the Dell:
The ATI DTV Wonder and its software find the most primary channels and also detects the "secondary" channels. Why is this?
Capital Broadcasting has WRAL-DT and WRAZ-DT. They are broadcast from the same tower. The WRAL channels (RF Channel 48) are now weak while the WRAZ channels (RF Channel 49) are consistently strong. Why is this? |
