DigitalNow Quad DVB-T Signal Qaulity (1 Viewer)

[deathnite]

Gentle people,

I have a slight conundrum which is driving me insane (and my wife). Ive been using mediaportal for a great many years and over a great many tuners.

14 Months ago I upgraded to the DigitalNow Quad DVB-T Receiver, in doing so I also installed a Hills TDA104 Splitter amplifier (band 345) 4 way 12 dB gain F type Splitter. Off this I run 3 normal DTV's and the Dedicated quad tuner box. (so 4 in all) All channels locked and loaded with not an ounce of pixelation or corruption.

The DigitalNow Quad DVB-T Receiver has been running in this system since the time of purchase without a missing a beat. Reboots for the system is usually about 3 months for OS patching.

Everything has been sweet and the kids and wife happy. Then wham, a month ago it all turned to poop. The DTV's where fine, but the Quad DVB-T Receiver cant pick up any channels. At time the error started occurring, where 3 tuners where not able to lock into a signal I installed DNTV Live to use the Station Searching function. The 3 Tuners in question would only ever get a signal quality of 10% (consistently). Where as the one working tuner is 100% Signal Quality and Signal Strength.

I expected this was a potential operating system problem, so to date I have re-installed the OS twice to confirm. But no joy.

So my first impulse is to say the DigitalNow Quad DVB-T Receiver is at fault. But just for ..its and giggles I turn OFF the amp function in the splitter. Low and behold all the channels are now sitting at about 70% Signal Quality and 40% Signal Strength. This is workable but except for any Network 10 channels are cactus on DTV's and Quad DVB-T Receiver.

All the coax and amp installed by a paid professional installer.

System is a HP XW6200 Workstation
Dual XEON 3 GHz CPU's
4 Gig EEC Memory
Windows 7 64 Bit
3 x 2TB WD HDD
This systems only function is to be a dedicated TV Service for the MediaPortal Server Application with 2 dedicated Clients. The system is housed in my home 42RU Rack and is constantly cooled. (lol ... Network Eng by trade)

Im still erring to the tuner, as it I am leaning towards the ol' "what changed statement", with the only variable being that the Quad DVB-T Receiver is not right. If it was the amp I am thinking all my tradional DTV's around the house would be having the same types of issues. (ps ive flipped around the coax connectors at the amp/splitter to verify all circuits working on that end)

Thoughts??

 

[Macfox]

Similar situation happended to me. I suspect the the Tuner is at fault. I had to disable one of my Tuners, else it would keep crash MP on some channels. I was going to RA, but for the WAF, not wanting to miss any shows.

Toying with the idea of buying another, but no so sure. It's a nice tuner, but fussy when locking on. Might go back to the twin USB tuners instead.

 

[globaldonkey]

Just bought one of these tuners myself, as I wanted to do some streaming to ipads around the house using MP Extended and needed some extra tuners. Had similar sorts of problems, and it drove me bonkers for about a week. They are a lot more sensitive to "hot" signals it seems. I successfully tuned everything with 100% signal level and 100% quality, but lots of discontinuities. Funny thing was, I noticed C31, which is a weaker signal in my area, tuned at 84% signal level, and it was running fine. So I put an attenuator in, which dropped C31's level down to 64%, but all other channels still showed 100%. C31 was still playable and viola, so were all the other channels now.

Prior to that I also had a lot of problems with hardware conflicts causing complete software lock ups of TV Server. Like could not even stop the service, and the computer would not shut down cleanly. Had to disable a lot of "unnecessary" onboard peripherals, including onboard SATA and USB host controller to get the card to work and stop crashing. Strange thing was re-enabling everything after re-installing the quad card didn't cause the crashes again, so I assume win-blows decided to re-allocate / re-configure some of the hardware resources that were not sharing properly. Confirmed this twice with a fresh install.

All-in-all not the easiest of installs I've done, but with a bit of perseverance I got there.

PS, I also think the DNTV live software is a bit flaky. Anything that needs "run as administrator" in this day and age is taking short cuts it shouldn't.

 

[Macfox]

I installed an attenuator as well. Adjustable one from jaycar. Addressed some of the issues, but not all. The dead tuner in my case I just disabled and installed the Twin USB. Not as elegant, but does the job.

Funny thing is that they say on the site, that you should only use this card if you have a good signal, but I guess not too good as we found out.

DNTV live is okay, but kinda amateurish compare to other offerings. It's was handy when trying to diagnose the dead tuner though.

 

[datfreak]

My digitalnow quad has been good - I get all channels with no pixelation.


Previously (before owning the quad) I had signal strength issues with other cards however...
I tried replacing the in wall/ceiling coax, new splitter, power amps etc - and it got a little better but still not great, only when I bought a much bigger high gain antenna was the problem fixed.
I also removed the gain amp, as with the big antenna it was not needed.


I used a big cheap one, that I bought directly off a electricial wholesale warehouse, I can not remember how much $$ but it was cheaper then all the other stuff I had tried.

 

[deathnite]

As a heads up, I ended up buying one of those expensive splitter amplifier at bunnings just to satisfy my burning curiosity. I have to report back that all my troubles went away.
Its seems my original Hills Splitter amplifier was cactus, so all back in business.

 

[TommySharp]

Glad you got it fixed. My server only has one PCI so I was thinking of getting one of these and getting rid of all the USB ones.

Will probably check my signal though as I already get lots of pixelation....

 

[mm1352000]

Not all pixelation is caused by bad signal quality...