Stream ATSC OTA over LAN? (HD Homerun?)

4728 Views 8 Replies 8 Participants Last post by audacity, Feb 12, 2011

Alex1978

Discussion Starter · Aug 11, 2010

I just got a silicone dust HD Homerun box and it gave me an idea. It converts the ATSC OTA signal to IP and lets you stream it over your home network to various devices in your house.

I think it would be cool if they weatherproofed the box so you could mount it outside on the mast of your antenna. I know the technology exists to send power over ethernet cable so they could power it that way. If they built a high quality amp into it you'd be set.

Think about it, if you ran some good RG-11 from the balun on your antenna just a couple of feet into this box on the mast of your antenna there would be practically no loss whatsoever. You could do all of your splitting with your network router, and you wouldn't need RF coming into your house at all. You'd just be routing IP traffic. And unlike splitting an RF signal, routing IP traffic is lossless. You can even do it wirelessly.

Another thing that would be cool would be if they built a GUI into the box so you could talk to it on your computer. If they made a rotor that connected to the box so you could control the rotor with your PC -- or better yet if the box was smart enough to peak the signal for you (if you asked it to) that would be awesome.

I know the technology exists to do all of this, somebody just has to put it together, and if they did I'd definitely set-up my system that way.

Save

1 - 2 of 9 Posts

audacity

· #2 · Aug 11, 2010

Silicon Dust has a "tech" (i.e. a "high end") version of the HDHomeRun, and I thought it would've been great if they had a Power over Ethernet capability in that product. Then it might be worth the premium over the original dual-tuner HDHomeRun

Maybe Silicon Dust will do PoE in a future product. I think the limiting factor for PoE is that there aren't many PoE switches available to consumers. I think the cheapest gigabit PoE switch is the Netgear GS110TP (8 port "smart" switch /w PoE) @ ~$260USD.

Save

audacity

· #9 · Feb 12, 2011

Yeah, but using a PoE injector doesn't really give you an elegant solution when the HDHomeRun TECH itself doesn't support PoE to begin with. My main issue is that the HDHomeRun TECH product doesn't support it. Even if you did the injector thing, you'd still have a kludge at either end of the ethernet connection.

I'm just saying that for the premium price that the HDHomeRun TECH commands, adding PoE support would have been nice.

Either way, mounting a HDHR outside is a bad idea, even in an enclosure. I'd be surprised if it had a operating temperature range much below -15C. I can't seem to find that information on it's spec sheet though.

Of course, if you want every dB you can get, apparently the HDHR3 has two internals tuners in one RF connection, so you don't need to split and take signal loss before it gets to the pair of tuners.

See less See more

Save

1 - 2 of 9 Posts

This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.

Top Contributors this Month