I just installed a CM4221 for a friend , 18 ft off the ground on the back siding, 30 ft RG-6 with 1 splice (wife insisted had to use a piece of white cable outside, not my wife otherwise I would be divorced by now, lol), and had to point it slightly west of Buffalo from Oakville (dundas st/bronte rd with a row of 3 story townhouses 30 ft away right across) closer to the true south direction because I could not get all Buffalo stations. I could not beleive that I had to point even farther away from buffalo , towards hamilton, to get the all the buffalo channels but FOX. With no rotor we had to compromise the digital CN tower stations and end up splitting the cable to use the analog tuner on the old tv to watch the canadian stations on the analog format and the digital versions from Buffalo. Still Fox eventhough shows quality it jumps constantly probably due to heavy multipath and does not lock at all no matter which direction. Other major US networks are fine. The funny thing I tried several directions between buffalo and CN tower and sometimes could get some sometimes others but was always missing a couple of US channel plus FOX. No amplifier being used either and the tuner is a Coolsat 8100 HD FTA Satellite Receiver for now. Could someone recommend me a good converter box, I mean that has EPG, Analog Passthrough (to remove the splitter although the converter box will split it inside probably) and a 5th generation ATSC tuner?. Or maybe a stand alone tuner but it can not be expensive , budget here around 50 cad, that is why I am thinking converter box.
BTW PQ on the 27 inch CRT TV for the Universal Sports on NBC's subchannel 2.2 is not bad at all on that small TV. You could hardly notice the macroblocking in my opinion associated to the source that I can easily see and bothers me on my 40 inch LCD Samsung at home.
Other than that my friend and his family are quite happy with the quality and channels variety. Too bad they did not have a big HDTV with full surround sound otherwise they would have been blown away as we know by the great ( and better than cable or Satellite) PQ.
Still it annoys me that I could not manage to get Fox , will give it another try next weekend despite the bad location of the house (row of townhomes too close in the back).
