Thanks a lot for posting this. Having the same issue here in France. I bought a 20 dB Amp to fix the artifacts.
My set top HD tuner was happy with 20% more signal strength, while the Nova-TD switched from “rather good with artifacts every 30 seconds on HD channels” to “no signal please check your cable” !!
I will try an attenuator and post back.

Another view on the subject : Back to the “poor design” approach. Wouldn’t it be simpler to find a card with better tuners ? That was my initial intention when getting up, before viewing this post. I had 2 alternatives to test :
- Terratec Cinergy 2400i DT PCIe
- AVerTV TwinStar PCI-E

Both are dual-tuners, and get rather good feedbacks. Well, the Nova-TD-500 did too. Anybody has tested ?

Cheers.

I put the insulation tape on the card which did seem to help. The attenuator made little difference as I live in a low signal area and use an Amplifier to get a signal.

Ultimately I still had flakey reception.

I ended up buying 30 metres of quad shielded cable and completely bypassed the internal cabling in my house through a window – this made a huge difference and the signal was great!

I then disovered a old cable joiner between the mast head amp and the first splitter coming into my house. I removed this old joiner and taped the end of the new cable to the old cable and managed to pull the new cable in through the wall (I was freaking out about losing the cable halfway).

I had heard that even well wired joiners and splitters can greatly affect the signal quality and for me this was definately true.

I wired it all up nicely and now my reception is almost perfect.

Thanks for your blog post as it sent me on a path to disover the issue.

I really hope this resolves my issues.

Could only pick up 4 channels (badly) now just rescanned and I’ve got 38!!