u/Vchat20

Subject TL;DR.

Been revisiting buying another HDHR tuner to primarily use with my Plex server. I do have a Prime that I had used for ClearQAM duties when my cable provider still offered that but it has since been decommissioned as that is no longer available to me so have been looking at going back to OTA.

I understand the issues currently surrounding the 4K/ATSC 3 model and the shenanigans going on with the industry as a whole. I live in the greater Columbus, Ohio metro and we have the one lighthouse transmitter covering our big networks. Now I thought based on the data on rabbitears.info that at one point it showed as encrypted but it is now showing as being open which is good! But given encryption still remains on the table makes me wary going into the future.

So I'm trying to get a feel from others if I should consider looking at a 4K model and gain the benefits for as long as the broadcasters here play nice but also have the ATSC 1.0 fallback or skip and go for the Quatro. The price difference doesn't seem drastic enough to make it a deal breaker either way.

Side note: I know the whole deal with ATSC 3.0 and the ac4 audio not playing nice with many devices including Plex and its clients. I'm aware of a tool out there on Github that essentially proxies the HDHR and uses the Emby version of ffmpeg to transcode to ac3 in real time. No personal experience with it but I figure if it does what it claims, I'd be totally ok with it. Not worried about the extra lossy transcode step on the audio side for OTA stuff.

Let me preface that I've been doing some research on this topic but it seems like there's not a ton of solutions that aren't a huge headache to go through.

Long story made short I have a trip coming up in a couple months where I may want to leave my phone behind at points and just have my watch on me. I have a PW2 LTE currently but no active cell line attached. Currently my primary phone line with T-Mobile is on a family member's plan and I'd like to avoid trying to add the watch line especially for this temporary use and maybe just add a temporary prepaid plan on my own for a month. Any good solutions out there?

One thing I'm thinking of but would like a sanity check if this would work out: Getting a second line on my phone as an eSIM and then will it allow me to attach that instead of my primary line to the watch? I was thinking about going with US Mobile as they have everything necessary to do the Pixel Watch tie-in on their Warp/Verizon plans.

Also if I understand correctly if a solution with a secondary line was possible, I'd still be able to send/receive text messages on my main line as it 'tunnels' back to my phone. Calls would specifically only send/receive from the number of the eSIM the watch gets. Any other fun tidbits here? I'm also not terribly worried if the watch gets effectively isolated from my phone/primary line and would just prep and make sure people that would need to contact me have the info to reach me on the watch.

Worth getting the 4K vs settling for the Quatro