[mythtv-users] Hardware Purchase

[Devin Heitmueller]

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 10:20 AM, Robert McNamara
<robert.mcnamara at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 6:51 AM, Mark Lord <mythtv at rtr.ca> wrote:
>> If you want OTA, then the HDHomeRun is one of the poorest tuners out there
>> for sensitivity of weaker stations.  Even the HVR-1600 beats it by a fair margin.
>
> Most people find the exact opposite of this to be true.  A quick
> search of the archive will show you a bunch of instances where people
> were able to pick up far more channels from the same feed with the
> HDHR, most likely due to its RF isolation (ie, it's not in the case).
> YMMV.

That's a dangerous area of speculation you are entering.  The reality
is that measuring RF reception performance is far more complicated
than "weak" versus "strong".  Different tuners will behave with
differing levels of performance dependent on a variety of signal
conditions.  For example, some tuners may perform better with weak
signals but behave worse if there are multipath conditions.

There is also driver quality to consider.  One value of a network
based tuner is that you are not at the mercy of the developer who
wrote the Linux tuner/demod drivers, and driver quality varies wildly
depending on device and kernel version (driver quality *usually*
improves over time, but I've seen regressions *many* times).

That said, in my experience RF isolation isn't really an issue with
internal designs.  The tuner is behind an RF shield for a reason.  :-)

I won't speculate on which tuners actually have better RF performance
due to an inherent bias.

Devin

-- 
Devin J. Heitmueller - Kernel Labs
http://www.kernellabs.com