If you don't want the expense of buying a personal video recorder but would like all the benefits of one using a PC and Windows 7 with the optional Windows Media Center installed - and when it works it is a very good system - you'll need some way of allowing your PC to have a chat to the digital TV signal. If they can't talk nicely, then the whole project is for naught.

Over the years I have tried many combinations of these things called digital TV tuners, not with too much success I might add. There was always some functionality, but not to the full level you'd expect. Admittedly, I have always lived in difficult-to-get digital TV; Sydney's Northern Beaches, Busselton on the south west coast of WA (think Margaret River waves and wines) and of late, Mandurah one hour south of Perth, but at the end of the day, if I can't pick up digital TV, the Government's promises of a complete roll out look shaky.

I have also spent probably the equivalent of the deposit of a small Porsche on amplifiers, antennas, cables etc to try and get these things working. I trust like many tech journos, the word 'cable' brings a shudder to the spine, tears to the eyes, the shaking of hands and gnashing of teeth while wailing copiously. I have enough cables to re-wire The Golden Gate Bridge if necessary - and that's just in my backpack. I actually have a cable room!

Which is a neat segue into the Kaiser Bass TV Stick Dual which sells for $129.

As the name suggests, it has two tuners built into its USB hub body which is slightly more portly than your average 2GB thumb drive. Thankfully Kaiser Baas has included a short extension cable (more bloody cables!!) to circumvent any obesity clashes between devices and the closeness of ports.

My setup was already running - sort of - using an HD Home Run (where do they get these names?) LAN based system. This is effectively a router shaped box with two TV input ports for coax and a LAN port - not wireless) for output. The theory is simply, fire up Windows Media Center, it will detect the device on the LAN and using the setup of WMC you can tune it in.

In practice, it is not that simple. Network connection is flaky, signal dropout common and most of the time I couldn't even get an ABC channel.  Any ABC channel.

After plugging the Kaiser Bas unit in - does anyone make a 12 port USB 2 hub, it is becoming rapidly needed - WMC detected the new tuner and offered to set it up. 15 minutes later, theoretically it was ready to go with my laptop technically having four TV Tuners all running in parallel. In practice, none of them worked. Not even my IceTV electronic programming guide worked. This is always the time to go back to basics and start again.

I uninstalled everything hardware wise and all the drivers, rebooted the laptop and plugged in the KB TV Stick Dual. As Windows re-started, it detected the TV Stick Dual, loaded the drivers, took me straight to Windows Media Center to tune it in and within 10 minutes I was on air. Well watching it anyway. Even the IceTV guide was working again.

The final test was to get it to record using both tuners, and to set up conflicts to see how it behaved. And the verdict is in. Didn't miss a beat.

There are downsides to using a USB stick. If all you have is a laptop then running the TV antenna cable to it may be problematic; ideally, a PC based PVR should sit in a corner and be a complete media centre / storage point for your music, downloaded videos (or ones you have shot yourself), photographs and the like and you have an HDMI output from there to a decent plasma or LCD telly as against a computer monitor. The other problem as noted is that so many devices use USB these days, there is an eternal fight over available ports. This was one advantage of the HD Home Run in that it was a standalone LAN device, and probably with a decent digital signal it does a brilliant job.

But if you want to dabble in computer based digital TV, the Kaiser Bass TV Stick Dual seems to do the job, is not that expensive and is a doddle to setup, not needing any LAN knowledge of IP addresses and the like. Oh and portable.

9 out of 10

http://www.kaiserbaas.com/KBA01010_Kaiser_Baas_USB_Stick_Dual_HD_TV_Tuner.html

By David Hague

David is the owner and publisher of AusCam Online. He has a background in media dating back to 1979 when he first got involved with photojournalism in motorsport, and went from there into technology via a 5 year stint with Tandy Computers. Following that, he ran a software distribution company on the Gold Coast and was one of the first to recognise the potential of Microsoft Windows.

Moving back to WA, David wrote scripts for Computer Television for video training for the just released Windows and Office 95 among others, and was then lured to Sydney to create web sites for the newly commercial Internet in 1995, building hundreds of sites under contract to OzEmail including Coates Hire, Hertz Queensland, John Williamson, the NSW Board of Studies and many, many more.

He went back into full time journalism as the Managing Editor for Channel 7's 'Gadget Guy', Peter Blasina's publications VideoCamera and Pixelmag, before starting Australasian Camcorder magazine when these publications were shelved. He lives at Sydney's Avalon Beaches nearly on the ocean front with dog Budweiser and in his spare time is a nut for motor sport, road safety, fishing, science fiction - especially Dr Who - and technology.

David can be contacted via david@auscamonline.com