I got a bottom-of-the-line 27" HDTV last month, and it's been a little fun watching shows in HD when I happen to be home during the primetime hours. The next logical step was to get an HDTV tuner. So I got this Air2PC card and plugged it in.

Now, according to antennaweb, I live 2-3 miles from all but one station I'm interested in. I have a simple indoor antenna with an internal amplifier from my days before getting cable. It works great in the television. Once I positioned the antenna just right, I max out the signal-strength bars and there isn't any interruptions in the signal. I can view all the stations without even needing to reposition the antenna.

So, I plug it right into the Air2PC card. On there, it is very positional. On the closest station, the signal fluctuates from 5% to 99%, then back down to 10% inside a few seconds. Other stations, I can barely break over 30%. So, with all of them, the signal is so flakey, I can't watch anything.

Are these cards THAT much more sensitive? With what I paid, I can't expect my TV to have a very good tuner itself. It's so cheap, there is no way to add those hard-to-reach signals manually, I just have to hope it finds it on an scan of every channel (and that it doesn't lose any other ones).

I am finding that my Air2PC card is much more prone to multipath problems than my older PCHD3000 card. It's the opposite of what I would expect, given that the Air2PC card has a newer chipset (5th gen).

I have seen a lot of posts with complaints about 'indoor' antennas, and tend to believe they are close to the ground and more subject to multipath problems.

I have run two Mythboxes with first gen (0.2) Air-to-PC cards from a conventional 20 yr. old TV antenna inside the attic, and have few reception problems. I am located around 30 miles from the Dallas (Cedar Hill) antenna farm and I get numerous HD stations. The signal strength runs mostly around 100% with the few weaker stations running around the 55% signal strength cut off. Bad weather will sometimes attenuate the signal enough to cause breaking up, when it worked on 'nice' days...

The key to keeping the signal coming is amplifiers and lots of them. UHF signals die out quickly in cable, and need to be reboosted while they're strong, before you start amplifying noise.

To this end I have an antenna that's large, stable, and two stories up. From the antenna, the signal is boosted by a head-end amplifier, the cable runs down to the garage, where there's a distribution amplifier, the cable from that runs to yet another distrubution amplifier as other sets and the 2 card mythboxes all get separate feeds from the amplifier (which is variable gain..) No splitters are used, they cut the signal to less than half.

This arrangement is complex, but works well. I have had poor luck pulling in even conventional TV signals with indoor antennas in my daughters' various apartments. The signal they pulled in was poor, and even amplification couldn't help it.

It's odd, but I did some recordings overnight from the card, and they came out very nice. I was using Myth's signal monitor and femon while not watching the card, and that's where my concerns came from. But these recordings only have some minor hiccups. Now I just have to figure why it's not importing my listings from zap2it.

I picked up two rev 0.2 cards off of EBay a while back and with R5B7 I had to install a different driver to get them to work (basically overwrite the driver myth was trying to use). When I switched to R5C7 the problems went away because it uses the newest drivers. You may also be having similar issues. Try a different hard drive and do a fresh install on that and see how it works. I just tried R5E50 and it's really nice. I just need to get through a few of the recordings on my current myth box before I can reinstall (I always do a fresh install rather than trying to carry information over).

I have noticed that there is quite a bit of antenna position sensitivity with the Air2PC cards. I have one of the Terk HD table top units in my living room and it's pretty good for reception.