satellite PVR with USB tuner

Spear13

hey guys!

i read the stickies up top and found out a LOT, but they raised even more questions.

I am planning to buy one of these: http://tinyurl.com/jgcgo
for those too lazy to click, its a usb dongle that captures HD content (ATSC & NTSC)
from an antenna or from an coax connection
The extasy that i could watch HDTV on my laptop was soon overcome by the fact that i could hook it up to a sat dish and recieve even more HD content from satellites!

after reading the stickie, i realized that the only hiccup in the system is the CAM (?) can anyone tell me if it is some kind of program or adapter thingie i have to get? and is there any way to "legally" get it? (hinthint*nudgenudge)

BTW, i have no satellite dish, or anything yet, so if i need anything else, plz help me out.

THANKS A LOT!

Spear13

edit- i found out that the satellite hookup is out of my price range, so im back to regular OTA HDTV

the USB stick tuner comes with a 3 foot mobile antenna, i surmise that this will be too little. forunatley, i have a ginormous antenna that my parents put up like 15 years ago.
i have no clue if it's UHF or VHF, but we used it to pick up tv signals before we got cable in '97.
here is a pic of the antenna:


Do you guys think it will be the right antenna to pick up strong signals?

THANKS!

CDan

You need a UHF antenna. Many of the older ones have pretty good UHF elements on them, with a splitter required to separate the UHF from VHS. The UHF elements are the shorter ones, closely grouped and sometimes in a v-shaped configuration. You can buy a UHF antenna at Radio Shack that's designed for hi-def.

Spear13

oh cool!!!


i has the whole v shaped thing, but the antenna that comes out of the v is much shorter than the ones i see on the internet, but there is a very long antenna coming out the back of the V so that might help.

anyway, im getting the tuner on friday, so ill get back to you on how everything worked.
thanks for your help!!

edit- when you meant that i need a splitter from UHF and VHS, do you mean a VHS cassette recorder?
im not too educated about the hardware of antennas and cable boxes and other stuff, so im not too sure about my whole plan.


edit2- i checked radioshack's website and found an EXACT copy of my antenna, only mine is 15+ years old.
http://www.radioshack.com/product/in...entPage=search

CDan

Typo, I meant VHF, not VHS. An antenna with both UHF and VHF elements will need a splitter to send UHF alone to a tuner. It's not mandatory, but preferable.

Spear13

ok thank you!

im not too sure if i have the splitter, i do not see any splitters near the antenna, but i think that it may be inside my house, as the wire from the antenna is white, and a part of the wire that is sticking out of the wall is black....so I dont know.
Thanks for all of your help, ill make a long post this saturday on the performance of the tuner and signal quality

CDan

Most of the old antenna installs had a wall-plate with screws for connecting. one set of screws for UHF and one for VHF. If it has a coax connector, then you can get an adapter-splitter at Radio Shack for a couple $. An HD tuner probably doesn't need it though, start without one. HD images are digital, so there's really no potential image quality issues except signal strength.