Over the weekend I finally moved the TV antenna to the other side of the house. Alex came over and helped me mount it, which was a great. It's sooo much easier to mount the antenna mast to the side of the house if someone is holding it.
As night fell, I hooked it up, when into MythTV and scanned for channels. ... Hmmm. Action36, a couple chinese channels, and KNTV, the local NBC affiliate. That's it? You're kidding me. hdhomerun_config_gui reported signal strengths around 40% and 40-80% symbol quality.
After I stopped being annoyed I realized that I hadn't conected the little amplifier box that came with the antenna. What a difference that made! MythTV found over 20 channels, many in HD, including all major broadcast networks. Signal strength comes in mostly around 70-100% and symbol quality is 80+%.
On some channels the picture is somewhat choppy, cutting out, or showing MPEG2 artifacts. I suspect that's what happens when some bits get dropped on the way from the transmitter to the antenna, and/or my MythTV system has problems playing full HD TV. I'll try some more fine-tuning of antenna orientation to see if this improves signal quality.
I also learned that solar PV systems can cause a lot of reflection of the TV signal, so it's probably A Good Thing that our solar system is behind the antenna.
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