Automatically Pick Best Quality Signal Source for OTA recording?

[Coosa]

I'm migrating from Windows Media Center (I hope).

My setup is OTA only. TV signals come from 3 antennas pointing in different directions to ATSC broadcast towers. A couple channels require a certain antenna for any reception, other channels work better from a different antenna and sometimes OK from other antennas. Some channels even come in fine on all 3 antennas.

With separate tuners on each antenna, under Windows Media Center I had to assign tuner priority on a channel by channel basis to the more difficult channels. But with NPVR there is one global tuner priority order --which is fine if all tuners have the same signal quality for a channel, and it does avoid picking tuners that can not receive a channel at all.

But as a user, I don't care much about setting tuner priority --I just want a good recording from a good signal source. If NPVR could notice signal quality (or strength) for each channel automatically, it might be able to weigh that when picking a signal source for recording. And since signal quality varies with time and weather, an ongoing rating might help too.

It is quite a challenge to figure out how to set the tuner selection priority in a way that will work well for me, because the quality of source signals vary between tuners (antennas) non-uniformly.

I did see one forum discussion that seemed to hint that a tuner device could appear in the Settings > Devices priority list more than once, but that was unclear. If it were possible to repeat the same tuner in the Devices list, and also edit the associated channel lists so they vary between the instances of the same tuner device, then I suppose I could work-around the global tuner priority limit with some careful effort.

But I'd really rather just have the best signal source get selected automatically, wouldn't you?

[johnsonx42]

Nice idea, but impractical to implement. Different tuners report signal strength and quality in different ways, some are very slow to report it, some don't report it at all. There's really no way for the app to know if a reported signal strength/quality is "good enough".

Any discussion you might have seen that indicated that a given tuner device could appear twice in the device list was referencing GB-PVR, the long-retired program that preceded NextPVR. There were a few clever uses for that ability, but it isn't possible with NextPVR.

The best you can do is to be picky about which channels you setup on each tuner; don't setup any channels that are unlikely to give good reception. If that doesn't leave you enough sources for the channels you use most, upgrade to a dual-tuner for that antenna, which will then give you a spare tuner you can add to another antenna with an amplified splitter.

You could also try combining two of your antennas into one signal using one of these: http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/19181208711...rmvSB=true. It's not what it's meant for, but I've read several stories of success connecting one antenna to the "Cable" input and a second to the "Mod" input. I won't suggest for second that this will definitely work, there are all kinds of issues with combining signals from two antennas, but if your antennas are fairly directional you do have a chance.

The other notion is to get a really big amplified omni antenna... but you're not using 3 different directional antennas for nothing, so I won't assume you haven't already tried and failed going the big omni route.