The Pro Stick is a black box about the size of your thumb, and about twice the volume of a flash memory drive. It can plug directly into a USB 2.0 port, but a short, bundled extension cable gives it more flexibility. The other end of the tuner sports a standard coaxial connector for an antenna or cable feed. Rounding out the package are the small remote control, a monopole antenna for direct, over-the-air tuning, audiovisual cables to pull an analog signal directly from a set-top cable box, and two software CDs.
To process HDTV, you'll need reasonably up-to-date hardware. The minimum requirement is a Pentium 4 processor running at 2.8 GHz or better, a gigabyte of memory, Windows XP or Vista, and at least 20 gigabytes of free hard drive space if you want to record programs. I installed it on a three-year-old Gateway with a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 chip, and the tuner worked with only an occasional stutter. Most new dual-core, Intel or AMD processors should have no trouble with it.
Setup was easy. I installed Pinnacle's TVCenter Pro software, connected the tuner to the antenna and started the program. TVCenter displays the picture in a resizeable window, changes channels and serves as a front end to the program guide and DVR.
I had TVCenter scan for both analog and digital channels, as well as FM radio stations and Internet radio sites. The device, which includes both NTSC (analog) and ATSC (digital) tuners, found analog signals from all Baltimore stations and a few from Washington. It found all the digital signals from Baltimore, but lost most of the Washington stations, which is similar to the experience I had with broadcast converter boxes a few weeks ago. The only local station it had consistent trouble with was Maryland Public Television, which can be problematic with both analog and digital channels in our area.
The TV center displayed a crisp, clear picture on a 17-inch Dell LCD monitor - particularly with digital channels, which is not surprising, since that's one of their advantages. HD images were sharper still, although I had to turn up the brightness and contrast on my monitor. Like most displays designed for computers, its default settings weren't jacked up as high as a typical TV set.
When I switched to the Comcast cable feed in my home office, the HDTV Pro Stick took about 20 minutes to search for channels and turned up several hundred of them - most of which turned out to be scrambled digital signals that require a box for decoding. But unscrambled digital signals from local broadcast outlets were there, plus a couple of clear channels from Comcast's digital tier. That was the QAM tuner at work.
