My SiliconDust HD HomeRun has a relatively good HD tuner, but it’s not quite as good as the built in tuner on my TV at picking up stations that are extremely strong and have multi-path reception problems. Although the signal My MythTV box reception of Fox TV would intermittently cut out as the SNR would drop too low to enable reception (even though, or, because the power level was pegged at 100%).

I purchased a Skywalker 16db attenuator, and it successfully lowered the signal strength of the (overpowered) Fox channel so that my HD HomeRun’s tuner chip could receive it with an acceptable SNR and no dropouts.

The only problem with attenuating my signal was that one of the two PBS channels (8, GPB-HD) was too weak to be picked up through the attenuator.

To fix this, I put the attenuator on one of the two tuners (Tuner1). To ensure that Tuner1 is always used to receive Fox, and Tuner0 is always used to receive GPB, I had to set up two different channel sources from Schedules Direct (They only let you set up one source per zip code, so my second source is from a region one zipcode away that gets the same OTA channels).

I deleted Fox on tuner 0’s channels, and GPB on tuner 1’s channels.

A few downsides: This setup does result in “duplicate” channels for each tuner, which makes the guide a lot larger. However, it isn’t really noticeable, as almost all channels are available on both tuners, so the guide just “repeats” before it “loops” back. (One set of channels include 8-GPB, and the other includes 5-Fox). If you happen to be watching Live Tv with tuner 1, you can’t pick up GPB until you manually switch to tuner 0, and visa versa with Fox.
And I have to be careful to record shows with option such as “record at any time on any channel” instead of “record at any time on this channel” to give the scheduler full freedom to record shows with either tuner. (Most stations are usable on both tuners.) Other than that, it allows us to watch both 8-GPB and 5-Fox without problems.