Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

In a moment of insanity, I saw somebody selling a 'new' Samsung SIR-T451 on eBay.

So, I threw in a bid and won it.

The timing was kind of poor as I was about to embark for LISA, so I knew it would be one big item waiting for me when I did get around to making a trip to the UPS store. And, I was worried that I might have too many big items waiting for me.

I was close. I didn't take into account that there would also be several pounds of catalogs stuffed into my box. I lugged those home, because I didn't want to sort through them and also plan to enter them at Catalog Choice....

Well, after processing all the other deliveries and mail...I set out to try out the SIR-T451 at receiving clear QAM. It would scan and the lock up and reboot. It made some progress at find HDTV signals, but I realized that it wasn't going to work. The channels are all weird (though making a custom channel guide using WiRNS might have been an option)...but there was also the use of subchannels...and they weren't on the first subchannel. Which meant that I wasn't gonna have anything usable via ReplayTV.

I was about to pack it up and give up, when I decided to see what would happen if I hooked an antenna to it. Largely because the signal light has been flickering lately on the SIR-T351 and there were a lot of bad OTA recordings...which was getting annoying. There was a mix from forums on which was better for OTA...the T351 or the T451. So, not having anything to lose at this point, I tried it.

Well, the T451 worked better for me. It had a fairly solid lock on WIBW-DT, but unfortunately no other HD stations. So, I set up on my ReplayTV.

That leaves the one open cable connection for something else....at least now I know that there are some clear QAM stuff in my area, perhaps I'll look to finally building that HTmac....