HD channel tuning and guide data for an 'unknown' channel

[snoopy]

I need to be able to thouroughly test my HD stations one-by-one. Unfortunately SageTV did not do a great job of this. What free software exists for thumbing through channels so that I may better program my antenna?

[Steve52]

You did not say what tuner you are using, but they usually give you tuner signal strength software for free to test with. At least I know that VBOX does. Visit your tuner manufacturer web site and check or send them an e-mail.

[snoopy]

Originally Posted by Steve52

You did not say what tuner you are using, but they usually give you tuner signal strength software for free to test with. At least I know that VBOX does. Visit your tuner manufacturer web site and check or send them an e-mail.

I was able to find it on the ATI website. I am using an ATI HDTV Wonder card. Now the problem I am having is with guide data and much assitance is needed. If you use the same call letters for a cable channel that you do for a HD antenna channel (ie. 10 and 10.2 which both use KWTX) then despite the number difference, one will not show up in the guide. If you use different letters for the station (say TheCW which is actually what 10.2 is) then no guide data comes in. It's damn frusterating.

I need a way to manually force guide data for this now, supposedly 'unknown' channel (The KWTX owned CW on channel 10.2).

Is there any way to force this?

[stanger89]

Not terribly familiar with messing with the guide for HD, but as far as diagnostic tools go, TSReader is the king:
http://www.coolstf.com/tsreader/index.html

[Tander]

Back when I was willing to look at SD channels, I ran my ATI HDTV in both analog and digital, which would give me duplicate channels, but they both showed up... one would say KTTVDT 5.1 and the other would show as KTTV 5... the trick is to use two different epgs, then Sage merges them... ie., you set up the analog (or cable if you will) and choose local, or another setting for the epg, then do another scan, and choose digital for this epg... then Sage merges them and shows all the channels.

By the way, you can go to http://www.antennaweb.org to get an exact list of channels local to you....

And another by the way..... how are you getting your cable channels? Are you using the ATI HDTV tuner? If so, it must be by the analog connection I assume.... the ATI HDTV has a problem with the S-video and composite connectors in Sage.

I was going to try to solve it by creating a "Network encoder" mod using the firewire thread here, unless Quin writes a special mod for the ATI...

[snoopy]

Thanks for the info very much. I could not figure out why it wouldn't show two (2) KWTX channels. It has nothing to do with the number or the station. It's all about the call letters. What makes this difficult is that some DT channels are listed with a hyphen which makes you think that KWTX-DT2 is the call letter. It isn't. The stations and antennaweb.org can have them listed with hyphens as well. The correct call letter in my case despite what is reported on the website is KWTXDT2 and not KWTX-DT2. Since SageTV uses the call letter to determine what guide data to pull, this understanding is crucial when manually adding an HD channel seen by your antenna. I could have three (3) different channel 10s as long as the call letters were different. If the guide data isn't there for one channel, then the correct call letter has not been entered.