TV Tuner Card not showing all channels

[dougsolo]

odd thing is happening - i have recently installed a new ATI All in Wonder HD TV Tuner card into my 64 bit vista box, and moved it down to the living room with 50' of coax and cat 5 for internet connection.

Using the Terk HDTVa indoor directional amplified antenna plugged directly into the flatscreen tv (which has a built in tuner already) i get over 20 channels. When i plug the antenna into the ATI card, i get about 4.

Does anyone know any rules of thumb regarding signal requirements for tv tuner cards? Could this be a software problem? We plunked down the cash to be able to get rid of the DirecTv dish, and at the moment it is just not cooperating. Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[muswp1]

odd thing is happening - i have recently installed a new ATI All in Wonder HD TV Tuner card into my 64 bit vista box, and moved it down to the living room with 50' of coax and cat 5 for internet connection.

Using the Terk HDTVa indoor directional amplified antenna plugged directly into the flatscreen tv (which has a built in tuner already) i get over 20 channels. When i plug the antenna into the ATI card, i get about 4.

Does anyone know any rules of thumb regarding signal requirements for tv tuner cards? Could this be a software problem? We plunked down the cash to be able to get rid of the DirecTv dish, and at the moment it is just not cooperating. Thanks in advance for the help.

I'm having a similar problem with my Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250. I can only get the local channels if I plug a cable directly from the wall into my PC's card. I was told I needed a cablecard to decode the signal properly, but Comcast has no idea what I'm talking about.

 

[mr2skeeter]

@dougsolo

I'm not sure what the rule of thumb is, but I can say that my Hauppauge HVR 2250 with an unamplified antenna works as well as, if not better than my ATI 650 Theater Pro with an amplified antenna. Perhaps it's luck of the draw, but I'm pretty sure the HVR 2250 is much more sensitive than my 2 year old ATI 650 is.

@muswp1

Are you using Media Center? For me, running a scan in VMC with TV Pack 2008 shows only 11 channels (Comcast in the Baltimore/DC area) with them all being local HD. However, if I edit the channel lineup I'll find another 150 unencrypted QAM channels, but for those you must setup the listings manually. Time consuming, but ultimately worth it. I would imagine if you were using other tuner software you would have seen all of the available QAM channels, although Happauge's WinTV 7 and Cyberlink's Power Cinema software are junk and I've not had too much success with QAM in GBPVR with TV Pack installed...

As for the cablecard, unless you have a cablecard tuner (like the ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner), it would't be of any use to you. Unfortunately, those tuners only come bundled with new HDCP boxes and you can't buy them directly. I have spoken to Comcast about them once before and they do have cablecards available in my area. I think the first one was free and $3 a month for each additional card, I can't remember though.