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Originally Posted by rabbit73
What make and model is your 60 inch plasma TV? Does it have a signal strength indicator?
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Panasonic Viera TC-P60VT60. It was the last generation before Panasonic exited the plasma business. I'd have a hard time getting coax to the TV directly since it's wall mounted with only HDMI between the DVR (soon to be the Tivo) and the TV run within the wall. But doable, if needed.
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Originally Posted by rabbit73
The Roamio should have a Diagnostics Screen that looks like this:
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I honestly haven't taken it out of the box yet since I have no antennas to run it with. But I can fire it up soon to confirm.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rabbit73
I spent a lot of time (8 pages!) helping mulliganman with his Tivo Roamio. I thought his problem was multipath. Then I thought it was signals too strong. Then I thought it was multipath again because his C2V was in a poor location, which was correct. His TV and his CM DVR did a little better than his Roamio with the poor antenna location. I had him make some tests using the Diagnostics Screen to check signal strength, SNR, and Errors. He finally moved his antenna to a better location.
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Sounds like fun! Hopefully mine goes easier, but knowing my luck - not.
The house is a brick veneer ranch with asphalt shingles. The gable roof flats face N & S, and since I'm going to be aiming mostly S & SW it should be "ok", but I also want to avoid the western brick gable wall (bricks will block more signal than plywood and shingles, right?). I'm also planning to "temp" the masts in place until I'm done tweaking and happy with signal, JIC I need to shift them around a bit.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rabbit73
Umm, you are getting a little ahead of yourself. You are at the point where you need to put something in your attic, to see how well it works, and go from there.
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Agreed. I'd like to get this hardware ordered today in hopes of using the long Memorial Day weekend to get some of this setup work done. What's your best recommendation for antennas given our discussion to "get something up there"?
I like the CS2 given the wide beam width, decent gain, and relatively economical price. I'm just wondering -- if the CS2 is not going to be wide enough to cover 164* - 268*.... even given that the channels between 201* - 268* are all within 4-8 miles and have signal dB > 50.
The DB8e would afford me the flexibility to point one panel at ~164*, and the other at 220*ish. Concern on the "ish" is beam width to cover ~200*-268*. I think one panel may be too directional to cover this 200*-268* span. And when I look at the published horizontal coverage spec for the DB8e with the panels slightly tipped out (say 15* or 30*), it seems (on paper) to cover less range at a given gain than the CS2 alone.
On the VHF side, I'm favoring the CS5 unless you think the 7694 would work better. I know the CS5 is about 2x the price, but I also value my time being spent in a hot attic in the summertime! The 7694 also isn't small - 65" x 35".... I've got that much room, but the antenna is going to have to be mounted fairly low in order for me to get the clearance, esp if you want some clearance between the antennae and the roof sheathing. I've only got about 4' of vertical clearance in the attic, it's a 4/12 roof, so I'd have to come down a min of 2' from the peak in order to get 5'+ of open space.