So it turns out that my PlayTV stuttering issues are probably not linked to signal strength, having verified the aerial (new), cabling (RG6) and signal strength reported by 2 other digital receivers as very high (one reports 100%). During tuning, PlayTV seems to briefly indicate 100% also. It's not the HDD (off during live TV) and I've tried 720p and 1080i output with no difference.But no matter - I'll wait for poor weather to test if an amp makes the difference.
The following setup shows what I've tried with a 5V masthead amp and it doesn't seem to make things worse at least, with or without 5V injection from 2nd USB port.
So because I don't have a DTV spectrum analyser, I'm just going to assume the masthead amp is doing something here. Certainly I see the signal input on the PlayTV jump to +5V potential in the above scenario, but can't determine the nature of the AC (MHz). I'll have to wait for some more testing.
Onboard Power
This is the ultimate goal - powering the amp from PlayTV. On the PCB there seems to be 1.9V and 3.3V rails (see comments on previous post - thanks Rowan). Finally I found the voltage divider - an IC indicated in the image with pin configuration below.5V __.___.__ 3.3V
| |
Gnd __| |
| |
1.9V __|___|__ 1.2V
So basically I need to either tap the mini-USB jack directly or the pin above to power the aerial signal (see marked solder point).
Danger Will Robinson!
ReplyDeleteI too was getting dreadful reception until I realised what was happening. Living in an overlap area between two transmitters, the PlayTV unit was finding the weaker transmitter first on low channel numbers and ignoring the strong transmitter on the high channel numbers.
This is what manual tune is for! But PlayTV doesn't have a manual tune. My solution was to only plug the aerial in half way through the scan, skipping the weak transmitter entirely, but I was lucky with channel numbers.
The PlayTV software is UTTERLY DREADFUL and I say that as a senior software engineer. AWFUL.