I'm looking for an explanation for a situation I recently had where my Beyond TV/Dvico FusionHDTV5 RT Lite was not receiving a HD channel that my HDTV was getting just fine (100% strength).

I had been watching the Olympics exclusively on my HDTV but I had set up some recordings on my PC. I went to try and watch one of these recordings and Beyond TV couldn't start the recording and spit out an error message about the recording being invalid. I tried to just watch the channel and got an error also. At this point I though I was having a driver issue so I went through the whole remove tuners from Beyond TV/uninstall drivers/reinstall drivers procedure. While adding the tuners back to Beyond TV, the NBC HD stations had 0% signal strength. I found this rather amazing at my TV was getting these stations with 100% signal strength.

The only thing that made any sense to me was that NBC or my local NBC broadcaster had set some form of "no record" broadcast flag. I fired off an email to the engineer at the station asking about this. He said he had no knowledge of any broadcast flag actions like that. I got another email from him a little bit later asking if I could confirm that I was now getting the NBC station. I checked and there they were in their 100% signal strength glory. I inquired as to what had happened and he said that he thought a piece of equipment had overheat and locked up and that he had reset everything he could think of. He also mentioned that there had been complaints from some HDTV owners also. Problem solved.

My question though is how a piece of locked up equipment could still broadcast a signal that most HDTVs had no problem viewing but my Dvico tuner cards and a few HDTVs couldn't see at all? I'm perplexed...

The usual issue is PSIP, which is the digital channel data. PSIP info can include time, date, station ID, program info, guide info, etc.

Depending how the PSIP is configured, it can cause havoc with DTV tuner reception. What you described would not be unusual.

Digital tuners can receive nothing if the the signal is too weak or if it is too strong.
The OTA tuner chips in HDTVs appear to be able to receive many stations that the tuner chips used in PC HDTV cards can. This is apparently due to the HDTV manufacturers willingness to spend more for more sensitive tuner chips in order to better compete against their competition.

Sometimes a station's PSIP data is a bit wacky, with some tuners being able to deal with it and other tuners not. A couple of years one of my nearby FOX stations caused one of my external HD tuners to lock up completely so that I had to unplug it to reset it, whereas my other tuners received it normally.