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Old 9-Jan-2015, 8:15 PM   #3
Pete Higgins
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Join Date: Apr 2013
Location: California, 58 miles @112 degrees from Mt. Wilson
Posts: 83
RE: Use inexpensive tuner as antenna pointing device

kenj66 & GroundUrMast

I guess I’m spoiled.

I use the Hauppauge “Digital Signal Quality (CX24227)” meter that is supplied with their WinTV v7.0 tuner software. It works with a number of their computer hosted TV tuner cards and reports SNR, Correctable Errors & Uncorrectable Errors detected by their cards. It opens in a separate window and responds to channel changes so it is always reporting on the channel the card is tuned to. Since it interfaces directly with the tuner card it doesn’t matter if I’m using the Hauppauge TV application or Windows Media Center to view the channel of interest.

The down side is that it doesn’t give a readout of signal strength. For that I have to use my Samsung TV & interpolate bars.

Neither the Samsung TV nor the Hauppauge tuner card report analog signal strength. (I have to use my Software Defined Radio with a software Spectrum Analyzer package for that.)

One thing I’ve noted over the last few years is that the antenna orientation that yields the strongest signal doesn’t necessarily provide the best reception but orienting the antennas for the best SNR always does.
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