The Tenuous Link

I've been up in the loft trying to point a TV aerial in the right direction. I assumed that putting a great big (cheap) aerial in the loft would be better than the (cheap) little set top thing I was using. I looked at where the TV installer man had pointed the one that we paid him to put up, and pointed it in the same direction. Disappointingly I still wasn't getting any picture at night time.

The tricky thing about digital TV is you can't just move the aerial around and watch how the picture changes because there is either a picture or there isn't one, so it's hard to pick the optimum spot. So I had a look about for a program to show the signal strength in to my computers TV card. Even though I have an AsusTEK LNA tuner, this download from Haupauge worked fine (on Windows Vista 64-bit version): ScanChannelsBDA_UK. I think the real homepage is here: http://nate.dynalias.net/ScanChannelsBDA/ScanChannelsBDA.html

I had to use options 2 (Scan channels with offset) for it to find the local channels, and then option 6 to show a continuous display of "Strength" and "Quality" for one of the multiplexes. Quality and Strength both went up and down as I moved about, and if I take the numbers at face value my signal strength is now twice what it was before, so hopefully I can rely on my PC to record late night TV for me now. When I read the Hauppauge web page it suggested higher numbers were better for signal strength, it seems for my AsusTEK card lower numbers indicate a stronger signal. The problem I have now is that although I've been getting a perfect 100% quality signal during the day the signal seems to disappear at night.

// posted by Steven @ 11:19 PM