I live fairly far from the broadcast towers in Denver with several intervening mountains. Nonetheless, according to the TVFOOL.com signal locator, I should receive a usable signal. In fact I do! With an ordinary somewhat new (2014) LG TV I receive many OTA broadcast channels from Denver. Ordinarily about 45-50 channels/subchannels are viewable.
So what’s my problem?..Not with a digital Tuner! So many stations that I can see live OTA are unviewable if they are near the “digital cliff”. I presently own a Silicondust tuner that receives many channels (about 30), but not these marginal channels. In the past I have tried units from Tablo and TiVo and they are no better, perhaps a bit worse. So stations that I can see live OTA if they are near the “digital cliff”… will fall off. BTW I have a high gain antenna, antenna amp and all the usual stuff.
It’s frustrating that the TV’s tuner pulls in a usable signal for these marginal channels but none of the external tuners seems to come close. has anyone found a tuner they think is better? In principle I could setup a video recorder and record the screen. Why is this so hard? Too bad TVs don’t have an “external out” port anymore.
There are a few possible things going on here. Do you have the antenna in the exact same spot when using with the TV vs the Tuner device? If not, try that.
If you’re using a Silicondust tuner then it minimally has two tuners inside the box. If your TV only uses one tuner, splitting the Antenna signal between two tuners vs. one may be causing the drop of signal.
You didn’t mention how far away your stations are from the antenna. Sometimes you don’t need an amplifier for the signal and that is a common thing people don’t realize that adding an amplifier can make the signal come in too strong and thereby make it seem like you’re getting a bad signal but in fact it’s coming in too strong and the tuners can’t handle that.
The one antenna is used for both the TV & tuner at all times. Therefore they can be and are operated simultaneously. The antenna amp is intended to minimize the loss of splitting, but in fact the amp makes almost no difference. Saturation due to overamping the signal does not seem to be a problem. The problem is most likely multiple paths for the signal due to reflections. I have used a signal analyzer to measure strength at various frequencies/channels. There is adequate signal strength, but the “quality” is likely what is lacking (this I cannot measure) except via the HDHR software which indicates signal quality/symbol quality. But why should a dedicated TV tuner work, and not an external tuner? Is it that the microprocessor (in external tuner)is not fast enough to both decode and encode the signal compared to a TV which is not needing to create an mp4 or other compressed format? That’s my hypothesis.
I see. So you actually have 3 tuners, so that split doesn’t seem to be the issue. Have you tested taking off the splitter and using the digital tuners by itself? There seems to be some interference regarding the digital tuner since your signal strength seems fine.
If possible also try moving the tuner to where the TVs is located as a test using the cable that would have been plugged into the TV. This will help rule out cable issues or even which connection on the splitter is used.
Speaking of splitters, not all outputs on the splitter are always the same. I have different DB output on some of my splitters. So that is something else to think about as well.
