For those of you travel quite frequently and don’t want to miss their favorite TV shows as well as those of you that just don’t want to deal with the monthly cable bill, OnAir Solution (Japan) and AutumnWave (Pennsylvania) team up to bring you the OnAir HDTV Receivers/Personal Video Recorders. AutumnWave is the US distributor for OnAir Solution’s product line, but not only do they distribute the hardware, they repackage the hardware and translate the documentation to something “us Americans” can read.

Today we’re taking a look at their portable solution, the OnAir HDTV-GT USB 2.0. The Unit itself is around the same size as a 2.5” portable hard drive enclosure and has been mistaken for one in the past week with people asking “Why do I have an antenna on my external hard drive??” I do a lot of traveling for my job, so I’ve been able to test the reception in a number of different parts of Florida, but we’ll get back to that later on in the review. First lets take a look at the box itself.

I’m a big fan of boxes instead of the “blister packaging” which I’ve seen from some other TV Tuners in the past. As you can see, they don’t disappoint with a well packaged unit.  The back of the box explained the simple installation procedure of installing the CD software suite and then plugging in the device, which I took the time to follow. 

What’s Inside?

This unit comes with a programmable IR remote control which uses the Onair HDTV as the receiver. I was a bit surprised by the tiny extendable “bunny ear” antenna and had serious doubts that it could get any reception at all in my home considering that I’m between 20 and 50 miles away from the “big 5” (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CW) towers to the North and South. It also includes the USB cable as well as an SVIDEO and Composite cable for input from other sources.

Test System: 

• Dell Precision M90 Workstation laptop

• Core 2 Duo Mobile 2GHz

• 4GB DDR2-667 Memory

• Nvidia Quadro FX2500M 512MB video

• Windows Vista 64bit

Since I’m running Windows Vista 64, I tend to look online at a company websites for the newest version of software & drivers before even attempting to use a CD, but once again, I was pleasantly surprised that the CD and the online drivers were not only the same version, but were up-to-date.  I’m assuming that this is due to AutumnWave repackaging the hardware here in the US.  There’s nothing worse than getting a product brand new out of the box and having drivers that have been out-of-date for months.

Installation:

The installation was pretty straight forward.  The CD autoruns to the following screen asking you to chose between their 3 different products.

If I had to nitpick any part of the install it was that I prefer a single install that gives you the choice of options rather than having to run 3-4 separate installations.

Even on Vista 64bit the install of all of the software packages went without a hitch. Now that we’ve got the software installed, it’s time to start testing.