Is this a reception problem?

[SkunkPerfume]

I am trying to tune DVB-T with a Diamond AMD ATI Theater HD 750 PCI tuner card (Link for spec: http://www.diamondmm.com/tvw750pcie-diamond-pcie-hd-tv-tuner-card.html).

The closest transmitter is on a hill 1 km from my house. I live on the last floor of my building, but the line of site to the transmitter is not clear. Also, My apartment is oriented in a way that there are another apartments between me and the transmitter.

The transmission in my area is 514Mhz with 8Mhz bandwidth, horizontal orientation and MPEG 4 encoding.

I tried to tune with the provided antenna, which has two telescopic poles of maximum length approximately 12 cm (not optimal for the wave length).

The tuner is not able to tune any channels. It have tried without sucess WMC, Total Media, VLC.

I tried to scan a range of frequencies with ScanChannelsBDA. The result is that all frequencies have strength of 50, my frequency and a couple of others have quality of 49, all the rest frequencies have quality in the range of 30-40.

I have tried "Prog Finder". I moved the antenna around the house the quality did not change, no matter where I put the antenna. I unplugged the entenna and the quality dropped to 29 (for this frequency).

With both programs, there was no lock on the signal.


I suspect that the problem is reception. But the strange behavior (is it?) of the quality made me think that it might be some driver or hardware problem.

Before I buy a Yagi antenna, or try to resurrect the mast on the roof from the analogue era, I would like to ask you what do you think about this?
What is the best thing I can do in this situation?

Thank you

[usually_quiet]

The small antennas that are sometimes provided with PC TV tuners are inadequate. An outdoor antenna would give the best performance, but a larger indoor antenna does work well enough sometimes.

I use a larger amplified indoor antenna in my bedroom. ...but here in the US, if I were 1 km from a full-power TV transmitter, there would be a possibility of overloading the tuner even with a basic unpowered indoor antenna.

[jagabo]

You probably need an attenuator.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Maxx-Online-Attenuator-Cables-Satbereich/dp/B00LGT3JK2/

[SkunkPerfume]

I bought a 10db attenuator. The quality is now 30-40. The power/level is still 50.

Also, I looked up the other frequency that gave high quality during the spectrum scan. It is 530Mhz. I found out that there is a DVB-T translation on this frequency. It is located in a another country, 250km from my home.


Any more ideas? Could the tuner be defective?

[SkunkPerfume]

Another thing that I could think about, the transmission is H.264 encoded, the tuner does not support this in hardware, but I understood that software can decode this.

Could it be that there is not lock on the signal because the software I use can't decode the protocol?