Hello,

Running R5E50 somewhat successfully. Trying to get over the air HDTV
with AverMedia A180. Have successfully got past getting saa7134_dvb
to load and firmware to load. When I try to "Watch TV" on this card,
I get a display of:
Signal 99% S/N 4.8dB BE 0 (1__) no lock
regardless of weather I have an antenna attached or not.

Other hardware in the box is Hauppauge PVR150 and PCHDTVx000
(I'm unclear on the number because I got the card a year ago and
it doesn't have the model number printed on the sticker). No dtv
from the PCHDTVx000 card, either. PVR150 works fine, as does
analog NTSC section of PCHDTVx000 card.

If I try scanning the channels from mythtv-setup, it claims to see
a dozen or more channels. I'm on the fringe (50 miles or so) but
I have a fairly high gain antenna with an amplifier mounted on the
second story, and I can get clear UHF signals on some analog
stations that also appear to have Digital TV stations that scan picks
up.

Does anyone know the magic incantation to get this to work? I've
searched the forum and read lots on the A180 but haven't seen a
solution to this (thought I did see someone else post the same
99% 4.8dB numbers). Many of the posts only seem to apply to
much earlier versions of Knoppmyth than R5E50.

Thanks,
Bill

surely somebody out there must use an A180 to get over the air
HDTV?

Bill

I know this is not what you'd like to hear, but . . .

I got as far as you did and ended up dropping back to R5B7.

In this version firmware loads and card tunes w/o issue. I figured that in time the issue would be solved.

Thanks, at least I know I'm not the only one who can't get this to work.

Bill

Did you get any further with this issue? I seem to be having a similar problem with an ATI card.

Amplification doesn't help as much with digital signals...if you amplify a digital signal too much, the quality of the signal degrades significantly...it's binary, so what matters most is whether the bits stand out against the noise in the background, if you amplify the signal, you increase the noise threshold and can clip off the peaks of the digital signal, which can make it unreadable.

So you might also want to try reducing the gain or removing the amplification from your setup to see whether it's the amplification that's rendering the digital signals unreadable. If it turns out that you're able to tune the digital stations w/o the amplification, then you might consider splitting the signal before amplification, so your analog-only jacks get the amplified signal, while the digital jacks get a clean, unamplified signal.