Change Recording Tuner based on Signal Strength (mostly OTA relevant)

[Lester Jacobs]

In my current SageTV setup I get two different type of feeds; analog cable and OTA (over the air) HD feeds from local stations. Sage will typically choose the OTA feed to record any shows that air in HD and which are available OTA. This is good since the OTA HD feed is obviously vastly superior to the analog cable feed. However, OTA being what it is, some of the stations that are fairly far away cannot be picked up reliably. As such those stations can periodically suffer from signal dropouts causing major stuttering and freezing in the resultant recording. In extreme cases the tuner won't even lock onto some stations in bad weather causing SageTV to display the "no signal" message.

What would be nice is if SageTV could automatically react to the fact that it has no signal by trying to use a different tuner (associated to a different lineup) whose associated lineup indicates that the same program is airing on it. In my case, if it were trying to record from an OTA tuner and was getting no signal, it would try an analog tuner and record the program there if possible. This would offer me some insulation against weather conditions on my OTA tuner by using the analog tuners as backup.

Anyone else think this might be useful functionality?

Cheers
Lester