HDHomeRun Dual Antennas

Another quick fun post. Although getting in the attic in this heat was rough.

There is a lot of discussion if you can combine two antennas together. It seems to boil down to try it as there are way too many factors that might give you a poor experience.

I didn't want to or felt the need to throw away my old as in 30+ year antenna so I kept that one (on the right) and added a second new one (on the left). The old one points to Phila and the new one to NY. I am about midway between the two cities.

I purchased two lengths of identical coax and ran the two antennas into a splitter I had. Then connected the splitter to the existing coax going down stairs. Note to do this you want a spliter that has all ports labeled in/out. You don't want a uni-directional splitter that has one input and two outputs.

This actually worked well enough (almost) in that I could view Phila and NY channels without the Phila antenna interfering with the NY antenna getting the same channel. However oddly enough I couldn't view the three main channels that I wanted! I could very poorly view them with the one antenna pointed to Phila. If that was because of the SDR being confused by two channels I don't know.

So on to plan B.

I purchased a second HDHomeRun converter based on the below blog from their support page. And to my surprise it works as advertised. Although you have to restart your app after you plug in and scan the channels on the second HDHomeRun. The app gives you a consolidated view of the two HDHomeRun converters. Neat!

Some notes.

While they indicate these are ATSC 3.0 TV compatible if the broadcast is encrypted they won't decode it.
So with the risk in note 1 I felt it still made sense to purchase these as by the time they sort out encryption I will still have saved money dropping cable. I just might have to figure out yet a new solution for OTA TV.
One thing HDHomeRun is clear about but bears repeating is that the tuner needs to be on the same sub-network as the client app. Supposedly you can allow the tuner and client to be on different sub-networks by setting up multicast DNS, but I have not managed to get it to work. My interest was having my IoT on one subnet and my computers, etc on another.
SDR stands for Software Defined Radio. Modern radios don't have a crystal tuner anymore.

See:

Networking https://info.hdhomerun.com/info/troubleshooting:networking#network

My new second antenna. It should do a good job of getting the NY channels, but I feel I am getting some interference.

Second antenna https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BG5SKZ39?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1

HD HomeRun page on dual converters https://info.hdhomerun.com/info/getting_started

SDR example https://wiki.gnuradio.org/index.php?title=RTL-SDR_FM_Receiver

I guess a pic or it didn't happen?