[mythtv-users] Nova 500 DVB-T Dual Tuner - Are they rubbish?

[Nick Rout]

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 2:07 PM, David Whyte<david.whyte at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> A while ago, I bought one of the above tuner cards for my brothers
> mythTV setup that I was doing for him.  Due to a number of reasons, I
> am only just now actually trying to set it all up and I am having a
> terrible time getting the card tuned in.
>
> In his house, he gets great digital reception according to the signal
> data output on his Sony LCD TV.  When I use the inbuilt mythTV channel
> scanner I only get channel 7 and SBS and sometimes Nine.  I even tried
> to use a Brisbane channels.conf file I downloaded from
> http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~chrisp/Linux-DVB/channels.conf , which is a
> bit out of date, but doesn't help at all!
>
> I have used scan and tzap and they all give poor results too.  scan
> will rarely pick up channels other than Nine and SBS. tzap seemed to
> tune, as in it had FE_HAS_LOCK, but the SNR was 0000 across the board,
> which seems too good to be true.  Also, the output file was unreadable
> in mplayer.
>
> I have activated the inbuilt amplifier as described here
> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Hauppauge_WinTV_Nova-T_500_PCI
>
> I searched the web and the mailing list and there isn't a huge amount
> of mention of this card.  Most people seem to have success with it
> though.  Have I done something completely wrong?  Are there any other
> suggestions for testing this card?  I have tried using a number of
> different cables (including good quality ones) and aerial points
> around the house.
>
> I am in Brisbane, Australia and am running mythbuntu 8.04 on the backend.

I have seen and heard of mixed results from this card. Couple of points:

1. Your kernel might not be up to date enough, perhaps you should try
a live cd of 8.10 or 9.04 and see if scan/tzap give any better
results.

2. As you've pointed to this page I assume you read right to the
bottom and have tried what it says under the last heading:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Hauppauge_WinTV_Nova-T_500_PCI#Note_for_Australian_Users

If you're in Adelaide, Melbourne or Hobart, you might experience
intermittent poor reception with ABC and SBS. There's more detailed
description of the problem in the mailing list archive. After some
discussion with Patrick Boettcher, it turns out the problem can be
fixed by editing the /etc/modprobe.d/options files, and adding this
line:

options dib3000mc buggy_sfn_workaround=1

(Yes I know you aren't in one of those cities, but who knows?)