I have a dual tuner tv card from Hauppage. Why must I use 2 set top boxes in order to record 2 shows at once?

Question

I tried to use one for my DirecTV connection but it wanted a second set top box in order to use both tuners

Answer 1

The tuner in your TV card is an analog TV tuner, not a DirecTV tuner. You need a separate DirecTV tuner for each channel you want to record at once on your computer. If DirecTV actually made a PCI/USB tuner it would be a different story, but they don't! Not only will you need the two boxes, but each box will need its own line from the dish, or at least two and use a multiswitch. You can't use a splitter as the coax contains power for the LNB on it and it is used to select polarization. Since there's only two polarizations and voltages used, only two lines are required and a multiswitch can be used to split them to as many boxes as needed.