Lots of Tuners

When I moved to my brand-new house, I found I had an interesting predicament. There wasn’t any ‘real’ internet services available – I could do Hughesnet, a satellite based system that wasn’t that great, or I could do some janky hotspot from an unknown provider. Since it was cheaper, I chose the latter.

I was recently divorced, and didn’t have much cash, so instead of bothering with DirecTV or DISH, and I don’t watch a ton of TV, I just went for Over The Air, ie, a TV antenna, something I hadn’t messed with in forever.

Back in the day, TV channels were a single channel per frequency. Channel 30 was whatever Channel 30 was, and that’s all you could get. Nowadays, there is a main frequency, Channel 30, and then a bunch of sub channels, so you’ll have Channel 30.1, 30.2, 30.3, etc. This allows a single station to broadcast multiple programs at once instead of just the main affiliate (CBS, ABC, etc).

For example:

This makes TV much more interesting. Instead of just having a handful of channels in your area, you have a plethora of different broadcasting available.

I did a search on rabbitears.info and found that I live conveniently in between two markets: Joplin, Missouri and Fayetteville, Arkansas. At the same time, I found I’m on the edge of BOTH markets so receiving signals might not be the easiest. Lastly, there’s a random station on west as well.

Example listing:

I had a cheap antenna at first which failed miserably. I decided that if I was going to do this I’d go all in. So I ended up with some Televes antennas, and a Clearstream one which did not work well. I’m on a hill, so I used my back balcony to put up the Televes one aiming towards Fayetteville, Arkansas and the Clearstream towards the random westerly station:

Then I took another Televes antenna and aimed it towards Joplin, Missouri and Kansas. Since it’s on the top of the hill, I just randomly rigged it to a tree:

With this setup, the stations going to the south of me are about 40 miles away, and 60 miles away going north.

Now, how do I use all these antennas? I have three of these:

These are Silicon Dust HD Homeruns. Each of the boxes contain 4 TV tuners. Therefore, each box has one antenna hooked up to it, capable of viewing 4 channels at a time for a total of 12 possible channels being able to be viewed at once.

Of course, why the heck would you want 12 tuners? Why, to record shows to hard drive. We’ll get to that. Let’s back up a bit first though.

First off, each box is hooked into the network via Ethernet and many Smart TVs (such as LG), Apple TVs, Roxu, etc, can control them via an app. This removes the need to run coax all over the house. This means you can control them from your TV remote or media box remote, as well as via computer.

Channels

You can use RabbitEars to figure out what you might receive in your area, but the easiest way is to do a scan to see what your boxes pick up. From my house, I can receive roughly 94 channels. If you live in a much more populated area, there is a good chance this number will be higher.

You’ll most likely get your normal channels in your area, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CW, PBS, etc plus many ‘main’ secondary channels such as DABL and MeTV. You’ll also likely receive a bunch of HSN-type channels sadly, but also a bunch of stations that do nothing but play old shows. Many of the more ‘minor’ channels change constantly so scanning occasionally for new stations might pop up something new.

The Silicon Dust Homerun HDs have a DVR feature and a guide feature to what’s on. For example, this was a sample of my guide:

DVR

So back to the whole hard drive thing. The reasons for 12 tuners is you can record whatever is being broadcast. It has a built-in DVR function so you can just point it at what show you want and it’ll record all the episodes of it as they’re broadcast.

The DVR will show you what’s available in your area based on the channels you can receive. Click the show, set to auto record, and forget it.

Movies are the same way. Set and forget:

While each one of these tuner boxes can use a hard drive hooked via USB to it, I instead took an old i3 Mac Mini and made it my server. You install a service on it that the tuners look for, and it will control the DVR. There’s Linux, macOS and Windows installs available.

And I’m saving all my shows and movies on 5 18TB hard drives 🙂 :

After a couple of years of this, I literally have thousands of movies, hundreds of TV shows, and you name its. While it’s not all the most ‘recent’ shows, I have plenty to watch pretty much forever.