In an attempt to stick it to The Man (aka Comcast) I’m trying to build myself a PVR to do HD and SD broadcasts.
The PVR part I can handle, it’s the antenna thing that drives me nuts. I grew up in the age of cable, so I’m just a bit confused here.
My capture card has two coax inputs, one for digital, one for analog. I understand that, I guess. What I don’t get, is does this mean I need two antennas, one for digital signals, one for analog? Can I just put an inline splitter on this antenna and fork the coax between the two inputs?
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. What’s the point of having two signals anyway? The majority of stations send signals in digital now anyway, the ones that don’t are usually the smaller stations. At least around the larger cities.
In any case, if you pick up HD channels that means they are transmitting a digital signal. When they show a show in SD it’s still digital. HD and digital are two different things.
Personally I’d just hook the antenna up to the digital part and have it search for channels. It should pick up all of the major channels in your area. Try going here to see the directions of each of the towers in your area, you’ll want to point the antenna the best you can at the tower because with digital either you get the signal or you don’t, no snowy pictures any more.
I’ve been using an antenna for almost a year now and wouldn’t want to go back since I can’t get the HD signal without paying a ton more. I’d like to know how you get on with the PVR since if I could find something to record HD and not have to pay a monthly fee for it I’d be all over it.
HD works on the same frequencies as analog broadcasts, so any good analog antenna should be a good HD antenna.
I’d use the digital port since you’re aiming for HD. Not sure why there are 2 ports though.
I just moved to an area without cable and I’m reasonably happy with antenna-only HD content, although I sure miss my History Channel and Comedy Central.
Out of curiosity, do the 2 connectors go into the same silver box on the board, or into 2 different boxes? It could be that it was cheaper & easier for them to design the board with 2 different off-the-shelf tuner combos - the analog just tunes & outputs the analog signal to the rest of the board, while the digital tunes & outputs the digital MPEG transport stream. Or it could even be that the analog input goes to a 1 chip tuner/encoder. What’s the board you’re using?
My TV has two ports. One is only ATSC (HDTV). I run my antenna into that port, and get HDTV over the air. The other is only NTSC, and I run standard def cable into that one.
Merijeek, try using the splitter to feed both ports from a single antenna. You can compare this with how the picture looks if you run the antenna into each port separately. If you don’t notice a difference, you’re good to go. If you’re near the fringes of reception, you might notice HDTV channels having reception problems when using the splitter, or more noise in the standard def channels. If that’s the case, you can look into a better antenna, or a second antenna, or an amplified splitter.
The frequency that your local station transmits its digital version on may not be–and will usually not be–the same as its analog version. For example, your local channel 7 broadcasts its analog signal on channel 7. But it’s SD and HD digital signals may be on physical channel 53. You’ll probably still tune your TV to channels 7.1, 7.2, etc, but you’re actually on the other “real” channel. Somehow the TV knows that “7.1” = “part of the spectrum of channel 53”, but I’m not clear how.
In general, UHF-only antennas are sufficient for OTA HD in the US. Most stations, even those with VHF analog signals, use UHF channels (like 53) for their digital forms. There are a few VHF digital stations I’ve heard of, but they appear to be uncommon.
In my case, I was able to get a UHF-only Yagi antenna and hide it in my attic to get OTA HD. Since none of my local stations transmit digitally in the VHF band, I was able to forgo the much larger VHF antenna.
The reason there are two inputs in your card is that, while both signals may come from the same antenna, the card was built with one tuner that can deal with a digital signal and one that can deal with an analog signal. I believe it’s cheaper this way than it is to build one tuner that can deal with both.
So the simple answer is that you just split the cable coming from your antenna. The slightly more complicated answer is that your digital signal is a lot more finicky than your analog signal, so when you split the cable, you lose half your signal, and you might not be able to get the digital channels. On analog, if you get a weak signal, you get some fuzz or ghosting in the picture. On digital, there’s error correction to a certain extent, so it’s resilient to some noise, but once you lose a certain number of bits, it cuts off hard and you stop seeing TV. Which kind of blows. I have an antenna-only setup, and I gave up on trying to get the analogs. If I don’t split the signal, I get all the channels I want via ATSC, whereas if I do split the signal, I get half the channels on ATSC, and all the channels (some fuzzy) on analog. So I ditched analog.
Another thing you can try is amplification. This helped me somewhat, but ultimately not enough. The key is to get a good amp that is doing its amplification up near the antenna where the signal is the strongest, not a cheapo one that sits down by your TV and amplifies the weak signal that it is receiving (in other words, amplify before you send it down 100 feet of wire, otherwise you’re amplifying the noise you picked up on the way too). In order to do this, you generally have the actual amp sitting up on the roof or in the attic with the antenna, but since there’s no power outlet there, you have a DC power injector down near the TV which sends 5V (I think) up the cable so that the amplifier on the other end can do its thing. A good amp often comes as an amplifier - power injector pair.