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

[Tim, Donna & Erin Gibson]

Neil

You've had some fun then haven't you...

Blind scanning will not work, what you really need to do is borrow a receiver 
already pre-tuned to stuff off B1/D1 and use your sat finder with that, best 
also get a compas and point the dish as close to the right direction as you 
can, similar frequencies of other satellites will make the finder go mad but 
if you try to tune Myth or a receiver it may not work.

Tim

On Thursday 21 December 2006 23:29, Neil Bertram wrote:
> 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
>
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-- 
Regards
Tim, Donna & Erin Gibson
ICQ - 2207616