TiVo Roamio OTA Digital Video Recorder

I decided to leave Direct TV after realizing that 9 of the 10 shows that i follow are over the air. I bought the Tivo Roamio and the 2 qty minis. If you are only buying the OTA Roamio then setup is very easy. It has a built in wireless connection if you have a wifi router at home but it also has jack to hardwire the network connection. Hardwire is always preferred for data rates but wifi is convenient and for the most part does what you need it to do. I use the wifi and streams HD without issue. The initial cost for my setup was a little steep. About $500 for the whole setup: Tivo minis/roamio, HD attenna, and power line adapters but our Cable bill every month was over $150. So we figure after four-five months all the system would have paid for itself and then we will only have to pay the $15 a month fee to tivo, $10 Netflix, and $12 Hulu, $37 total for a whole lot of tv. That’s still saving us over a $100 a month and we don’t have to worry about contracts or crazy rate hikes. I love these Tivo boxes so far but there is a learning curve to get a configuration like mine good to go, Roamio plus two minis I’ll try to go over some of the details in hopes that it will help someone else that has question regarding their configuration. First the HD antenna. I bought an amazon indoor antenna that has a 50 mile radius. It works great. The model I bought was “Amplified HDTV Antenna - 50 Miles Range, 1byone” and placed it in a window on my second story. Did I say this thing works great because its pretty awesome for the price. Then I plugged the antenna cable (coax) into the cable (coax) jack of my house so the signal was reachable in any room that had a cable (coax) plug. You lose a little bit of signal strength by doing this but not enough to lose a channel from what I saw. I did this because this signal needs to plug into your Roamio to get the OTA (Over the Air) channels. By having each plug in the house available for connection it allowed me flexibility in deciding which room to place the Roamio in. No where do we place the Roamio? If you have the ability to hardwire do it if not go wifi make sure you can place the Roamio in a room closer to your router than further so you have good signal strength. Reason being is streaming HD video requires a good signal or you’ll get a lot of buffering if the signal is weak. If your router has the ability to use different channels go with the 5Ghz.Theirs less interference in this band but once again signal strength is key. Yes the Roamio does support this band but it may not on the older versions. My current version does. Anyways back to the signal anything over 50% located in the settings part of your Tivo box under network will work. Lower than that it becomes kind of sketchy for the HD streaming from apps like Hulu or Netflix. The minis require a hardwire connection to the network. You can do the Moca suggested version, uses coax for the network connection, but I went with the network over powerline config and it works well. My reason for not going over the coax is because I want those lines to be as clean as possible for my OTA (over the air) channels I was collecting from my HD antenna. The model I used for networking over the power lines is Netgear Powerline 1200. Note: Streaming HD from the Roamio over wifi to your router and then from the router over hardline to the minis does perfectly fine despite what the Tivo rep said in chat. In short: 1. Activate your account first on the Tivo website and register the devices first. This sometimes takes awhile for them to process so do it right when you get the equipment. 2. Connect your HD antenna. (Try different places in the house for the best signal) 3. Setup the Roamio, hardwire if possible, and validate your channels and apps are working 4. Install the inline power modules 5. Connect your minis to the inline power modules. When you do this give it a few minutes to connect to your Roamio. I was trying to fix a connection issue that wasn’t an issue because I wasn’t giving it time to sync even when the mini’s said it couldn’t find the Roamio. All I had to do was wait and like magic they were talking. Hope this helps someone.