ATSC OTA and Cable Channel Confusion-OTA, HD-PVR, & SD

[Savage1701]

OK, I was just noticing this last night and it confused the heck out of me.

I have a couple of PVR-USB2's that grab the usual 2-96 or whatever analog cable signal.

I have an HD-PVR that grabs the HD stuff via STB & USB-UIRT blaster

Since I straddle 2 markets, I have some ATSC tuners for Madison, WI and some for Rockford, IL

I was noticing that many of my OTA HD channels suddenly vanished, even though they were clearly tunable and green-dotted under scans and setups.

These are the problems I found:

The Madison download calls the same channel differently than the Rockford download. e.g. WTVODT vs. WTVO-DT or, worse, WTVO-DT2 vs. TheCW.

My cable operator puts out some channels on standard def analog. One was, you guessed it, WTVODT.

My cable operator puts out some digital SD & HD channels. Guess again my example - WTVODT.

Long story short - I had to eliminate all instances of one WTVO-DT or WTVODT - to get Sage to recognize my OTA preferrence.

This happens on secondary channels as well.

The hyphen/no hyphen thing throws SageTV for a loop, as does the out and out different naming, such as WTVODT2 vs. TheCW.

Bottom line - watch your channel names closely under your analog cable, STB to HD-PVR cable, and cross-market if you happen to have that option. Sage's provider does not consistently name the same physical channel with the same logical name.

Just an FWIW