Back when Comca$t blocked recording of local channels, the lion kingdom considered hiking to the top of the local mountains to get within view of Sutro tower & recording local channels that way. It would have required a big PC with the original PCHDTV PCI card & a big hard drive to record the 12GB of data per hour. There would be no way to watch it on the mountain.

15 years later, there's a cheap USB dongle that can play local channels on a phone. The dongle actually dates back 10 years, but only now is becoming needed. The original plan would now involve hiking up with a phone & a small SD card. It would even be able to show the video.

More importantly, since nothing is really on local channels that can be downloaded elsewhere, the dongle can be used as a 2Ghz spectrum analyzer. There has been a growing need for a spectrum analyzer below 2Ghz.

The day job uses a more expensive HackRF as its spectrum analyzer. It goes to 6Ghz, has a transmitter & a very wide 8Mhz bandwidth. The TV dongles save money by only having 3.2Mhz bandwidth.  Trying to find signals with 8Mhz is already pretty horrible.

The mane challenge with the TV dongle is the software is barely functional & would most certainly require breaking out Android Studio. It's tempting just to spend 4x more on a hackrf, but there's also 10Ghz radio.

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