OTA TV and HDHomeRun

There’s no HDHomeRun app in Samsung’s store, so I built one with Claude Code during a football game. The Apple TV app exists, but it lists channels like files in a folder that you click through, and my Apple TV isn’t even set up right now. I’d been watching through VLC network streams on my phone or laptop. I wanted the TV itself to behave like a TV: open on a channel, flip with Ch+ and Ch-, see what’s on. As far as I could find, that didn’t exist. (SiliconDust has a sideload-only test build on their forum that I never tried.) ...

Rain attenuates radio signals, so in theory a TV antenna and a tuner that reports signal strength should make a rain gauge. A UHF broadcast at a fixed frequency should drop when precipitation is in the path between the transmitter and the antenna. Compare it against a VHF channel, which is much less affected by rain, and you can separate weather effects from transmitter issues. Same principle as dual-band GPS receivers canceling ionospheric delay by differencing L1 and L2. ...

My TV antenna lived behind my TV in the living room. Reception was inconsistent: if someone walked between the antenna and the window, the signal dropped. If I forgot to pull it out and angle it before sitting down, I got nothing. I had an HDHomeRun FLEX DUO from a previous place where I had the antenna setup dialed in. I moved and never got around to setting it up again at the new apartment. The antenna behind the TV was the placeholder that never got fixed. This week I fixed it, and the same day I finished, I used it to watch the FIFA World Cup from an airport lounge and a plane on the way home from a trip, free, with no cable subscription. That felt worth writing up. ...