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

[David Whyte]

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bit out of date, but doesn't help at all!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.

Thanks for any help!

Regards,
Whytey