2. Hardware Tour

The Pro Stick and its included remote control (the quarter is for scale.)

The Pro Stick is as portable as a flash drive-in fact, it looks so much like a flash drive that people will probably mistake it for one. Constructed of shiny black plastic with a cap for the USB connector, the Pro Stick is a nice looking little device. I can hold the entire system-including the remote and antenna-comfortably in the palm of one hand.

The Pro Stick does not use an external power supply-it draws its power from the USB port on your computer. Note that sometimes front USB ports on desktop and laptop ports don't put out enough juice to run external devices like the Pro Stick, so make sure that the port that you plan to use has sufficient power.

The remote is almost as small as the Pro Stick itself. Usually I would be bugged by an undersized remote, but in this case, I can forgive the cramped and funny looking remote because it's designed to be portable. After all, what's the use of having a miniature HD tuner if you have to lug around a "regulation-sized" remote in order to use it? Pinnacle did a good job of fitting as much functionality as they did into a small amount of space, without making the buttons impossible to push. The Pro Stick remote is chunky and slightly rounded, making it comfortable to hold, and the buttons are spaced far enough apart that there's no risk of pressing multiple buttons simultaneously. It runs on 2 AA batteries (which are conveniently included.)

The Pro Stick with all attachments connected.

Everything you need for TV viewing is included with the Pro Stick, including a telescoping antenna and remote control. It seems unlikely that a device that looks like a slightly overgrown flash drive should be able to output 1080i HD video, but it does it with style. Pinnacle even managed to add analog capture capabilities into the tiny Pro Stick. A dongle cable plugs into a port on the side of the Pro Stick, providing composite and S-Video connectors for video input, and a 3.5 mm headphone plug for audio input. (The dongle cannot be used to output audio and video to a display; the connectors are input only.)

The Pro Stick is capable of capturing terrestrial ATSC broadcasts in high definition. ATSC broadcasts are over the air (OTA) and require the included antenna. I'll admit that I was skeptical about the telescoping antenna that came with the Pro Stick; my own HD antenna is considerably more substantial. However, I discovered that it did a decent job, and once I found a good position for it, I was able to maintain a consistently strong signal (averaging 85-95% signal strength).

Still, while the Pro Stick antenna was adequate, it wasn't perfect. I noticed that there were times that the signal strength seemed fine, but the signal quality dropped, causing the video to skip (see the image below.) During a one-hour recording, the signal quality failed significantly 13 times. When I connected the Pro Stick to my main HD antenna, however, I stopped seeing this problem.

The signal strength and quality appear on the upper right hand side of the screen.

The Pro Stick is also capable of tuning standard definition cable TV, but is not capable of QAM decoding, which is required for watching digital cable in HD. If you want to watch high definition, you need to plug in the antenna. One drawback to using the Pro Stick is that cable TV cannot be connected at the same time as the HD antenna, so you have to switch back and forth depending on what you want to watch.