tuner advice -Pinnacle Dual pro pci & freecom USB

[mrcheapo]

Hi Folks,

I've just started using gbpvr in the lounge using an MVP and ethernet back to a 2.3Ghz 512mb P4 PC and I was wondering if anyone is using one of these cards sucessfully?
Link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pinnacle-PCTV-Du...752&sr=8-2

Whats puzzling me is the following:

The card is detected as 1x "Pinnacle PCTV DVB-T Dual". I've added the Pinnacle card twice as Pinnacle Dual1 (Dev 1) and Pinnacle Dual2 (Dev 2) under capture sources with a freecom added as freecom usb set to Dev3. I'm uncertain if this is the right way to get GBPVR to deal with the cards esp given the Dual tuner capability as I'm getting incomplete channel listings when I scan. Is there a further adjustment needed in the gbpvr config files?

I seem to have a bunch of channel listing / reception issues.
I'm setting my capture device regions to "Northern Ireland", "Limavady" (nearest transmitter, about 5 miles away) http://www.ukfree.tv/txdetail.php?a=IC711296
The antenna in the attic gets a consistent strong (80-95% bar) signal on our regular freeview box for all channels. (The freecom USB which I had previously seems to have fewer problems which is strange in itself as it's quite finickity to get working in the 1st place.)

However when I scan, I get the BBC channels and a bunch of other stuff going missing. Strangely it's mostly channels which are on lower transmission strength that appear consistently whereas the ones at full power come and go on repeated scanning. Totally removing and readding a capture source seems to help in getting a fuller scan list BBC reappears, Sky News and others go. Not setting a region gives a different inconsistent list usually - BBC etc appear the hitsa nd others go.

Any advice or feedback on steps for setting this up to work consistently is really appreciated.

Thanks.

[sub]

The card is detected as 1x "Pinnacle PCTV DVB-T Dual". I've added the Pinnacle card twice as Pinnacle Dual1 (Dev 1) and Pinnacle Dual2 (Dev 2) under capture sources with a freecom added as freecom usb set to Dev3.

The device number only gets increased when there is multiple instances of devices with the same driver name.

The pinnacle would have two capture sources, set as device #1 and #2. The freecom would have one capture source set as device #1.

[mrcheapo]

A reply from the man himself! Thanks very much Sub! Very cool software BTW.

Configuring the tuners correctly seems to have helped quite a lot.
However I'm still getting scanning/reception issues with detection / capture quality. I'm wondering if the aux cooling fan in the old compact form desktop I'm using is the suspect in part for the variable reception.Possibly throwing off a little too much RF noise when it spins up and killing recordings in progress etc?

I'll continue to play around to see if I can get things a little smoother.

Cheers for the advice.