[mythtvnz] Hello! And DVB-S woes...

[Neil Bertram]

Hi everyone!

I've just moved into a new place that happened to have a sky dish left 
over from the previous owners. For some time I've been wanting to set up 
Myth, so it seemed like a good idea to go get a DVB-S card and start 
playing. So I did!

I bought a Skystar2 ("ST STV0299 DVB-S") and it comes up fine with the 
b2c2 module (btw tried all this with the windows software too, no luck 
there either, but I'm primarily a linux person anyway).

When we moved in, for some reason I took the sky dish off the house, so 
I had to put it back once I got the card. The neighbour has a dish on 
their roof too, about 2 metres away from where ours mounts, so I used 
that as a rough alignment guide.

I soon set to trying to get a signal with dvbtune, on the Optus B1 at 
12483MHz. I had one of the old Sky LNB's with fixed 11.3GHz LOF, so 
translated that down to 1183000Hz for dvbtune. I used vertical polarity 
and 22500 symbol rate. And I got nothing (the FE reported FE_HAS_SIGNAL 
and FE_HAS_CARRIER only, which seem to always be present when the LNB is 
connected, no matter which direction the dish is pointing).

I tried wiggling the dish around, but still found absolutely nothing. 
This went on for a few days of me trying absolutely everything I could 
think of, including a blind scan between 10000 and 15000MHz (vertical 
and horizontal pol) with the windows software, which turned up nothing.

So I presumed the LNB was dead, and bought a new universal dual LNB from 
freeviewshop. It's a Zinwell ZKF-DJ21, which I think at least one other 
person on this list has one of? It uses the 22KHz tone to switch into 
high mode, and diesecq commands to switch which LNB to use, and has a 
10.6GHz LOF in high mode.

Naturally this didn't help things at all, I had the same result. Next I 
replaced the cable with a brand new pre-crimped one, still nothing. Lots 
of dish wiggling and frequency scans later, I decided I should probably 
buy a satfinder to get better aim, so I did.

With the satfinder I can sweep across the sky and it goes crazy across a 
rather large horizontal patch at 45' elevation (which the dish has been 
set to all along). The card still sees nothing (including after a 
10000-15000MHz scan in the area where the satfinder made the most 
noise). When I put my hand over the LNB, the signal goes way down, so I 
know it's picking *something* up... And it looks to be pointing in the 
same direction as the neighbour's one still.

So I guess at this point I ask is this a common thing? I haven't found 
anyone by googling that's had this much trouble getting a lock on D1 or 
B1 (I've been scanning for 12420V on D1 lately, as something that should 
exist).

I guess the card could be suspect, although it was brand new a month 
ago, and it does lose carrier and signal when I unplug the LNB, so the 
air interface appears to be healthy...

My dvbtune line currently is "dvbtune -tone 1 -f 1820000 -p v -s 22500 
-m", which is 12420V on D1 ((12420-10600)*1000). It tunes it fine, says 
it has signal and carrier, then sits there polling and never seeing 
anything.

So that's where I am right now. I live in Wellington, so if anyone 
either has a sky dish that I could hook the card up to to test it, or 
could lend me a card/STB that I could use for testing on my dish, I 
would be very appreciative! Advice is welcome too, but I'm pretty sure 
I've tried everything by now...


Many thanks,

Neil