Antenna rotor control?

[elaw]

Okay so here's a challenging one...

Santa Claus has just brought me an A180 card, so I'm going to be adding OTA HDTV to my current Sage setup (current = SD DirecTV via a PVR-150).

Where I'm located it looks like I'll be wanting a fairly directional antenna due to multipath issues and distance from the transmitters. Problem is, the transmitters are in a variety of different directions from my house.

It seems like the ideal setup would be an antenna rotor that's controlled by Sage, which would move to different positions when viewing/recording programs on the HD card. To avoid wear & tear on the rotor, it would be best if the setup was smart enough to *not* rotate the antenna when recording/viewing from the SD card.

So, anyone... do you think this is possible, and if so where do I start? I'm using Sage v4.1 if it matters.

Thanks!

Eric Law

[Lucas]

I have a similar setup but with a motorised sat antenna. The rotor controller(sat positioner) has memories for each position which can be called via an IR RC.

My sat receiver is configured for dozens of channels on various satellites.

I ve long thought on how to have this automated so when I select a channel from the capture source to which the Sat receiver is connected to, SageTV would send a 1 or 2 digit IR code via the USBUIRT to the rotor controller.

I think the solution would be to have SageTV be able to, on a per capture source, configure a second, in addition to the channel digits, IR sequence that would drive another device.

With Studio out this may be possible although it sounds tricky.
Maybe one of the STV developers can look at this and provide some hints.

[paulbeers]

I don't know how many "different directions" your hdtv signals come from, but another option (and probably cheaper than buying a rotor device) is to buy multiple hdtv cards and "basic" antenaes and only have sage use the channels on each card that can be tuned. What I mean is say your HDTV channels are like mine (16, 19, 31, 50 and 59). You could have one card only set to tune 16, 19 and 31 and another card for 50 and 59. As long as those channels each come from the same general direction. I am lucky enough to be able to use a basic indoor antennae since all of my towers are within 10 miles of my house and all in the basic direction so that I don't need to worry about something like this setup. I think it would be just as cheap buying another a180 and wouldn't require some special programming. Yes it would require another pci slot taken. Oy.

[SHS]

probably cheaper than buying a rotor device

Not really paulbeers there about $84+S/H for a Channel Master CM 9521A Complete Antenna Rotator Kit.
Eric you maybe able do this but I think you have go to Girder or you have write your own plug-in for SageTV in order to do Multi-Events at the same time and it most likely be a real pain in a@@ to get working the way you want but as paulbeers said multiple antenna maybe the better way to go and if need FM go for Omnidirectional FM Antenna and be sure add FM trap to TV Line

Most all read this What are the basic rules for TV signal reception?
http://www.antennaweb.org/aw/info.as...Q#_Ref28770259
and this
http://www.tvantenna.com/support/tut...combining.html

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by elaw

It seems like the ideal setup would be an antenna rotor that's controlled by Sage, which would move to different positions when viewing/recording programs on the HD card.

I know I've seen IR rotor controllers, but it was ages ago.

I know the control part is possible, as my TapeItAll does this with my BUD. Problem is, a guy wrote custom software to take the channel number and change it to a satellite (pause) channel. You would have to find or write some software to do this.

Wonder if Grinder could do it? At least you would only have a few channels (compared to a dish) so your lookup tables would be small.

Originally Posted by elaw

To avoid wear & tear on the rotor, it would be best if the setup was smart enough to *not* rotate the antenna when recording/viewing from the SD card.

You could kind of do this, by making the listings at different priorities.

[rfutscher]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

I don't know how many "different directions" your hdtv signals come from, but another option (and probably cheaper than buying a rotor device) is to buy multiple hdtv cards and "basic" antenaes and only have sage use the channels on each card that can be tuned. ......
Oy.

When I tried this Sage kept trying to use the wrong card for the channels and I kept getting blank screens.Some times it would work and some times it wouldn't, depending on which card Sage tried to use.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

I don't know how many "different directions" your hdtv signals come from, but another option (and probably cheaper than buying a rotor device) is to buy multiple hdtv cards and "basic" antenaes and only have sage use the channels on each card that can be tuned. What I mean is say your HDTV channels are like mine (16, 19, 31, 50 and 59). You could have one card only set to tune 16, 19 and 31 and another card for 50 and 59. As long as those channels each come from the same general direction. I am lucky enough to be able to use a basic indoor antennae since all of my towers are within 10 miles of my house and all in the basic direction so that I don't need to worry about something like this setup. I think it would be just as cheap buying another a180 and wouldn't require some special programming. Yes it would require another pci slot taken. Oy.

Wow, you must be close to a city. Where I live, I'd need a $500+ tower (at least 30', maybe need 40') and 3 $100+ (closer to $200 each) antennaes to get the local (50+ miles to the closest towers) channels!!!!!

Plus, aren't the HDTV cards kind of costly???? I'd need 3 to do it that way, don't know about the origanal poster.

[sundansx]

I have an idea...I dont use an rotatable antenna, but I think I know how you could do this:
There is a plugin for sage called "External Status Monitor Interface". Girder can connect to it via TCPIP and query info from Sage's status. The info goes like this (More has probably been added since this):

now_playing_type: nothing
now_playing_show:
now_playing_episode:
now_playing_artist:
now_playing_channel:
now_playing_starttime:
now_playing_endtime:
now_playing_currpos:
now_playing_state: stopped
num_recording_devs: 1
recording_1_dev: Hauppauge WinT
recording_1_show:
recording_1_episode:
recording_1_chan:
recording_1_starttime:
recording_1_endtime:

You could easily write a LUA script that parses this text and pulls off the now_playing_channel: and recording_1_chan:. You could then setup a table that cross references the channel with an antenna position. Girder then could set the antenna position based on this table (Setting the position via girder will be very setup specific). If you had a IR antenna you could get USB-UIRT to crap out a IR code.
Just make sure you setup some recording padding in the beginning to allow for the antenna rotation delay.
I have included a LUA script that I use to on my system to parse this data to display data on my front panel LCD about Sage status. It will be a good starting point for a project like this. You could even use the Girder XPOSD to display some antenna rotation status on the display if you can instrument some feedback.
I think you might need a girder plugin installed to do tcpip stuff, forget which one, likely Lua-Socket Library (I think it comes with girder).
good luck.

[elaw]

Oooh! That's a great suggestion!

I've already got the status plugin. Now I'll have to see what's needed on the rotor-control end of things. I've seen some rotors with IR controls, but I suspect it's just "turn CW" / "turn CCW" commands. May have to get clever and engineer something myself.

Thanks!