[mythtv-users] Hauppauge WinTV-quadHD issues

[John Pilkington]

On 05/02/2021 10:22, Simon Hobson wrote:
> John Pilkington <johnpilk222 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>> I can't find where to configure multi-rec.
> 
>> mythtv-setup > Input connections > select device > interactions between inputs > max recordings
> 
> That's that one sorted
> 
>>> It's not finding any DVB-T2 muxes.
> 
> Well I finally managed to get it to find the T2 mux. Had to do a manual tuned scan and experiment a bit with the settings till it found it.
> Does anyone have a list of the right settings for this mux (BBC B) ?

The only setting that I used to have problems with was the BW:  8 MHz
> 
> 
>>> * having two cards I needed to use a splitter - so lost a lot of signal strength. It was fine when I first set it up here, but has degraded to the point where I had to remove the splitter and disable one of the cards - thus hitting limitations with only one real tuner.
> 
>> Perhaps a bit late now, but a preamp before the splitter ought to maintain the signal to noise ratio as well as boosting the level.  Newer tuners do this on-chip.
> 
> I did think about that, but it's one more box, and one more source of noise on the signal. Now I've got more tuners in one slot, and I'm now ready for when more channels start shifting to T2.

Yes, a low-noise preamp as near as possible to the antenna will add a 
little noise - but you can then split it, maybe several times, with 
essentially no further degradation.  I'm feeding 4 MythTV tuner ports 
and a TV...  Gives a single point-of-failure, of course.

> BUT ...
> I think I might have found the cause of the loss of signal - and it's one of those "doh" moments. I've a GpA antenna, vertically polarised, and pointed at Lancaster - not horizontal and pointed at Winter Hill. It says a lot that with the wrong polarization and off-axis aiming (according to Wolfbane, they are about 30˚ apart) I still get a usable signal. The reason for this was to avoid needing a wideband antenna to cope with the frequencies in use on Winter Hill when we moved here (and ARQ B is still on Ch 55, 602MHz) - Lancaster was already using GpA frequencies for all it's muxes, is closer, and has a stronger signal. I'd completely forgotten about that, and I guess failed to notice when I must have done a rescan a while ago.
> Thinking about it, I probably need to try an attenuator now ! But that's for another day.
> 
>> I forget which release you have been using, but a *lot* of work has gone into DVB channel scanning recently.
> 
> 0.30
> 
> 
> So what a right pita it's been.
> If I do a full scan, then it finds two lots of muxes and duplicate channels - but it doesn't store all of them. I exit and save, go back in, and there's only the 4/5/6 muxes when I would have expected to find anything up to 12 if it's picking up Winter Hill. When I exit, it tells me there's unused muxes and offers the option to delete them or ignore them - I assume I didn't want to delete them, so chose ignore, but it's deleted them anyway.
> Shouldn't it store all the muxes it's found - or have I missed some detail ?
> If I delete all but one mux, edit that to the frequency of the matching mux from Lancaster, then "scan an existing mux" and "scan related transports" I get ... 4 muxes from Lancaster and still find it's picking ARQ B from Winter Hill - plus one I couldn't identify as it doesn't match anything on either https://ukfree.tv/transmitters/tv/Lancaster or https://www.freeview.co.uk/help/coverage-checker/detailed-view (which both agree on what I should be getting).
> 

I thought I remembered that your location made this difficult, but that 
means you would probably have benefitted from Klaas's recent tweaks, 
which (can) add selection of transports by signal strength.  I see 
essentially only one transmitter.  But of course once you have a working 
setup the need  for complex (or even "full") scans will be less compelling.

One other point: the 'linking' of transports probably won't know about 
relay transmitters, and will try to use the main-chain one, which iiuc 
will usually be horizontally polarised.
> 
> Anyway, for now "it's working" so I think I'll avoid the temptation to break it for a bit :-)
> 
> Simon