March 2012

Will You Lose DIRECTV Channels Tomorrow?

DIRECTV and Tribune are heading toward a contract deadline. When this happens, both parties generally look to their customers for support. Tribune stations started running a crawl on Wednesday on the bottom of the screen urging…

Read More

Hands on with the Birdog USB Plus

Professional installers need professional tools. If you’re out there in the field you need a meter you can trust. My friends up at the Solid Signal corporate offices sent me a Birdog USB Plus by Perfect10. This…


Hands on With the DARBLET

SolidSignal.com is among the first to offer this exclusive new video processor. There are some people who enjoy manually tweaking every image setting for the best possible result, even if it means stopping what you’re watching….


Hands on with the DIRECTV HR34 with HD Menus

Note: Please download the PDF to see the graphics which originally accompanied this article. DIRECTV’s HR34 is the top of the heap. There’s no other consumer DVR that lets you record any 5 HD channels any…



Samsung Smart TVs – Don’t Upgrade to 1028 yet

Samsung Smart TVs how have access to software version 1028 through the internet. Direct download is available now. As with other Samsung upgrades, it hasn’t shown up on their web site yet. It probably will…


What’s the difference between MRV and RVU?

This is a question I get about once a day. DIRECTV’s HR34 DVR uses a new technology called RVU, supposedly, but people who get HR34s can’t tell the difference. It’s easy to get confused. MRV is the…




Multiroom DVR Showdown

If you had your choice, which DVR would you choose? Unfortunately, you don’t have a choice most of the time. Most equipment only works with one provider, so you have to take what they give…




DIRECTV HD Menus Dissected

DIRECTV’s new HD menus look a lot better than the older menus, and the reason is simple: instead of being created at a single size, DIRECTV’s new menus are created separately for 480i, 720p, and…



Geezer vs. Weakling: Antenna Showdown, Part 2

In part one of this series, we looked at a 44-year-old antenna that’s still going strong after all these years. Now we’re looking at the Winegard HD1080 kit from Solid Signal. This is one of Solid…