US QAM tuners that work

[SLR_65]

Does anyone have an HVR-1800 up and running and a spare pci slot?

If so, drop me a pm!

/Steve

[whurlston]

I have an HVR1600 setup that's dialed in and is now completely reliable. As a result, I like it. I had to spend some time (too much) getting it exactly right - I found that all the amplifiers I tried made things worse, some cables I used were poor quality and seemed to kill the higher frequency channels.and I had too many splitters. Some splitters I tried just would not work.

Bottom line: I wouldn't recommend this card, but it can be made to work with careful attention to signal strength over the range of channel frequencies and careful choice of splitters and good cable.

The problems you had should be the same with any QAM tuner. You need to make sure that you use RG-6 and not RG-59 for cabling. Splitters and amplifiers need to be rated to at least 950/1000 MHz (1 Ghz).

Another thing to keep in mind is that tuners usually need about 10% better signal for tuning QAM than they do for tuning OTA as well. A good general rule of thumb is 80% for OTA and 90% for QAM.

As for the thread topic:
I have two HDHomeRuns, a Vistaview Saber and a Pinnacle PCTV HD Ultimate Stick (used mainly for testing and travelling). The Vistaview works about as good as the HDHomeRuns but channel changes are slower on the QAM side.

[SLR_65]

The problems you had should be the same with any QAM tuner. You need to make sure that you use RG-6 and not RG-59 for cabling. Splitters and amplifiers need to be rated to at least 950/1000 MHz (1 Ghz).

Another thing to keep in mind is that tuners usually need about 10% better signal for tuning QAM than they do for tuning OTA as well. A good general rule of thumb is 80% for OTA and 90% for QAM.

As for the thread topic:
I have two HDHomeRuns, a Vistaview Saber and a Pinnacle PCTV HD Ultimate Stick (used mainly for testing and travelling). The Vistaview works about as good as the HDHomeRuns but channel changes are slower on the QAM side.

Hi Whurlston,

Yep - you're right! On analog a poor signal usually just gives ya a poor picture, but you do have a picture and many can live with it. On digital it's more of a it works or it doesn't work kinda thing. i.e. many can live with a little snow in the picture but a choppy stuttering playback is unacceptable so preserving your singal by using good quality wiring is a must with digital.

I'm thinking an HD Homerun may be the move and considering there's two tuners in it it's not really a bad price. I don't think I've seen a bad review on one of those yet.

My 1600 behaves as you say - OTA it works fine, but on QAM it wants a ton of signal, 90 is actually marginal on mine as it will occasionally glitch on one channel that's on 90.

I've read somewhere where someone had an HVR-1800 and a 1600 in the same system at the same time. The 1800 worked fine and the 1600 had problems. The 1600 showed about 10% less signal than the 1800 and since they were both in the same system at the same time the only real variable was the 1600 (and yes, they switched the coax feeds around and got the same results, so it wasn't a bum coax or splitter causing the problem).

I can't find that post again though. I was hoping somene here with a running 1800 and an open pci slot would be interested in installing my 1600 in their system to do a head to head test to see if we can duplicate the findings, I'd say if we can then it confirms the 1600s have a dud tuner in them.

TTYL,

Steve

[vmq]

I can't get a reliable lock from this card on all the digital channels. Using an amp it helps but still isn't 100%. Soooo, I'm pretty much out of luck. The cable co wont do a thing to make it work and there's no better wiring, etc. I can use, so there's really no way I can make this card work.

Steve,

maybe you have seen this thread. I'm exchanging emails with the Hauppauge service on a weekly basis and they are trying to figure out the problem. In the meantime you can try the "old" version 3.4d1 drivers. Makes all the difference for me, clear QAM works like a charm with them, and not at all with newer driver version.

Volker

[SLR_65]

Oh, one more thing . . . most tend to misunderstand amplifiers. amplifiers can't magically make something out of nothing. They can make a signal stronger but in doing that they also increase the noise presented with the signal, so although the signal is stronger the signal to noise ratio is worse. It's best to amplify a good signal rather than try to improve a poor one . . . i.e. put an amplifier before all those splitters in the house rather than putting a bunch of splitters in and then trying to amplify the low signal coming out of the splitters back up.

[SLR_65]

Steve,

maybe you have seen this thread. I'm exchanging emails with the Hauppauge service on a weekly basis and they are trying to figure out the problem. In the meantime you can try the "old" version 3.4d1 drivers. Makes all the difference for me, clear QAM works like a charm with them, and not at all with newer driver version.

Volker

Hey! Thanks! I'm not at home so I can't get to the system right now, but my card is about a year old. It is a qam capable 1600 and even says qam on the card tuner sticker. It came with a driver cd that I loaded and the thing didn't work well. I added a BIG amplifier and it helped but still wasn't great. I later downloaded the newest drivers from Hauppauge and the thing worked MUCH better, but still not 100%.

Sooooo, I dunno what my initial drivers were. I do know the most recent ones worked better. Hopefully these drives are somewhere in the middle and will do the trick for me! I'll try to play later tonight and let you know.

Like I said, my cable company isn't too helpful if their stuff is working. I'm wondering if I just need to complain that my set top boxes keep dropping out ever so often, not all the time but usually when I want to watch something - basically tell them it does it but it could take hours for it to show up . . . hopefully they wouldn't want to stand there for hours waiting for it to drop so maybe they'd just crank up the signal for me to see if that would fix it . . .

Thanks for the input - I'll post back what I find.

Steve

[dennit]

The problems you had should be the same with any QAM tuner.

Except that as SLR_65 has found, the same signal delivered to other QAM tuners works fine, but does not work on the HVR-1600. It's just very very picky. It appears that he has a signal that he just can't get to work on this card.

I gave it a high quality signal that worked perfectly on two other QAM tuners. It should have just worked, yet I was at a point where I thought I'd never get it to work, too. I feel his pain and understand why he posted. I used RG-6 quad shield (Belden), SNS compression connectors and tried 6 different amplifiers, none of which improved things. I used high quality 1GHz splitters, even tried satellite grade splitters rated to 2.5 GHz, and got various results.

I would find that a direct connection would work worse than a single splitter installed. Where the splitter was placed seemed important. Ultimately, it seemed that I had to balance between a signal that was too strong and one that was too weak. You'd expect installing a splitter to reduce signal strength, but it would sometimes have no effect (when measured on the Hauppauge signal strength meter).

The reason I posted was to give some insight into how I got it working, not to disagree with SLR_65.

[SLR_65]

Hi Dennit,

I didn't really mean to disagree with you either - I just wanted potential buyers of this card to realize that you may not be able to get this card working by simply upgrading your cable wiring or balancing where you put splitters and where you get the signal for the 1600 from.

Cable companies (around here at least) are very stingy with their signal and they wont crank it up just to make some after market piece of equipment work. If their stuff is working that's all they care about and it seems this card is so picky that many times it wont run when other equipment will run just fine.

If you have good wiring and the cable co equipment is working fine then you just may not be able to get this card working as the only fix is better signal and the cable co usually wont give that to you (and I don't really blame them - they face the same issues we do with signal levels and they have a lot of subscribers to keep happy so they can't just crank signal levels up as when they give us more signal they decrease the signal available on their main trunk line. They do that too often and they'll start affecting service to lots of people).

I'm really curious about the driver as my original driver didn't work well at all but it got much better with the newest driver. If there's an intermediate driver in there I may have a shot at getting this working!

I'm even more leaning towards a driver issue now as from what I gather the 1800 is just a 1600 with a pci express interface so it's curious as to why it seems to work OK but the 1600 doesn't. Maybe it is a driver issue and the 1800 is using different driver code to run the pci-e interface.

Sigh, I JUST put the HTPC in the entertainment center and now I gotta drag it back out and lift the lid . . . hopefully the wife will be distracted with all her black friday bargains and wont pay attention to the mess I'm making in the family room!

TTYL,

Steve

[highflyer875]

Really? I have a HVR-2500 and it works great. I get all my non-scrambled QAM no problem. I have no issues with GBPVR and can record 2 HDTV, 2 Analog, or a mix of both with out issue. I have TW cable. I think the issue is with the cable company, but I would agree the tuners in the TV have to be much better. Look what they need to put on the little card to get it to fit on the high size PC card. If your cable company is a pain in the A** like most are, get a Cable Tuner with DVR and pay through the nose, you can even hook it up to the HVR-PVR.

I also had a Divco HDTV7 dual PCi card, It worked well for off air HDTV but the software is very buggy and did not mess well with Titan TV. The Analog side was soft so it did not work with GBPVR (HD side does).

Oh one thing that may help. Do not place a surge protector between your cable and the tuner card. This will weaken your signal. Even the cable company does not recommend them (I could not use one on my TV with a Cable card).

[SLR_65]

I've thought about getting another cable box and running it through the PVR-150, but then I have another external box and a blaster to deal with as well as another monthly charge from the cable co. Picture quality may suffer too as you convert from digital to analog and back again.

I don't think I'll get a cable co DVR until there's no way to make a roll your own DVR work as NBC and HBO have already exercised some DRM on certain shows.