milliAmp

A few weeks ago I wrote an article on trying to get the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid TV Tuner working with New Zealand’s and had a mixed result. Well recently Elgato brought out EyeTV 3.0.2 which seems to fix all the problem I was experiencing with it.

• The interlaced channels now actually play properly.
• The “New Zealand” setting has the correct parameters.
• It doesn’t appear to stutter after playing back a recording after 10 minutes

My only issue now is that the signal strength isn’t particularly great and I’m suffering choppiness and dropouts every 10-20 seconds at some times of the day. By the looks, that is a lot to do with the aerial on the roof and slightly broken wall socket for the aerial. It is still very watchable but it does get frustrating after a while.

We rent the place we’re staying in at the moment and only moved in in March so I hadn’t really paid any attention to the roof, turns out, we only have a VHF/UHF combination aerial unlike 90% of the houses in the area which have a VHF aerial and a medium or fringe UHF aerial. This explains why reception of Prime is so crap.

In Hamilton, an “infill” Freeview|HD transmitter has been set up in the CBD which means that we are approximately 2.5km from it. The big problem is that the aerial isn’t pointing in that direction so we can’t really benefit. To show the difference though, the aerial is probably pointing out to Te Aroha at the moment but I can’t get a stable Freeview signal from the Te Aroha frequencies but I can on the Hamilton Infill frequencies so I have a hunch that if the aerial was facing the infill the reception would significantly improve.

Some approximate trigonometry using Google Earth and a ruler shows at least 15º rotation between the two transmitters from our location.

My next step is to investigate options of repointing the aerial or asking the landlord nicely for a UHF antenna.