[mythtvnz] No signal on TeVii s480

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 02 Jun 2012 12:30:07 +1200, you wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I am trying to set up a s480 card for watching/recording Freeview over DVB-S but
>am having no luck so far. Using mythtv-setup or dvbtune or w_scan all show nothing:
>
>w_scan -c NZ -f s -s S160E0
>
>dvbtune -f 1733000 -s 22500 -p h -m
>
>Are those correct?
>
>I have a working freeview decoder on the dish which has a 10.750 GHz LNB
>frequency so I assume that there wouldn't be an issue with the dish or cable.
>
>I'm using mythbuntu 12.04 and the firmware from TeVii's website. dmesg shows
>that the card seems to be happy.
>
>What can I do next to diagnose the problem?
>
>Cheers
>Glenn

I had to add the -tone 0 option to get my s470 to tune with dvbtune. I
do not think I ever got w_scan to work with the s470.  I will have to
reinstall it and try it out, now that I have a new motherboard.  My
TBS 5922 USB DVB-S2 tuner works much better - it does not seem to need
that -tone 0 option, so I suspect that it defaults to whatever tone 0
does.  Since w_scan does not have any equivalent to -tone 0, that is
probably why it does not work with the TeVii cards, at least here in
NZ.  I was looking at patching w_scan's source code to add -tone 0,
but then I had to swap to the TBS tuner due to needing the PCIe slot
the s470 was in for another card, so I never did complete that.

The frequencies for Freeview DVB-S are:

12456000 Hz
12483000 Hz

You need to subtract your LNB frequency (10750000 Hz) from that for
dvbtune, giving:

1706000 Hz
1733000 Hz

To get the other scanning utilities to work, you need to use dvbtune
to do all the tuning, as it is the only one that has the -tone 0
option, IIRC.  So you run dvbtune in the background or another bash
window, then use the options on your scanning program to get it to use
an already tuned in tuner.  For example, with scan or scan-s2, use the
-c option.  I wrote myself a script to do that automatically.  This is
the script for the Freeview DVB-S transponders:

#!/bin/bash

# Scan all Freeview satellite frequencies for channel information.

# Transponder frequencies (Hz)
declare -a DVB_S_FREQS=(12456000 12483000)
declare -a FREQS=${DVB_S_FREQS[*]}

# Adapter number of DVB-S / DVB-S2 card.
ADAPTER=3

# LNB frequency (Hz)
LNB_FREQ=10750000

# Symbol rate
SYMBOL_RATE=22500

# Output file to store the results of the scan.
OUTPUT_FILE=freeview_satellite_scan.txt

if [ -e "$OUTPUT_FILE" ] && [ -f "$OUTPUT_FILE" ] ; then
    rm "$OUTPUT_FILE"
fi

for a in ${FREQS[*]}; do
    echo [Tuning to $a Hz] | tee -a "$OUTPUT_FILE"
    dvbtune -f $(($a-$LNB_FREQ)) -s $SYMBOL_RATE -p h -m -c $ADAPTER
-tone 0 2>1 >/dev/nul &
    DVBTUNE_PID=$!
    sleep 1
    scan-s2 -c -q -a $ADAPTER | tee -a $OUTPUT_FILE
    kill $DVBTUNE_PID >/dev/nul
done


And this is the one for the Sky transponders (note this script
requires a DVB-S2 card as it checks the DVB-S2 transponders used for
the HD channels too):

#!/bin/bash

# Scan all SkyNZ satellite frequencies for channel information.

# Transponder frequencies (Hz)
declare -a DVB_S2_FREQS=(12267000 12331000 12358000)
declare -a DVB_S_FREQS=(12295000 12349000 12421000 12519000 12546000
12581000 12608000 12644000 12671000 12707000 12734000)
declare -a FREQS=${DVB_S2_FREQS[*]}" "${DVB_S_FREQS[*]}

# Adapter number of DVB-S / DVB-S2 card.
ADAPTER=3

# LNB frequency (Hz)
LNB_FREQ=10750000

# Symbol rate
SYMBOL_RATE=22500

# Output file to store the results of the scan.
OUTPUT_FILE=skynz_satellite_scan.txt

if [ -e "$OUTPUT_FILE" ] && [ -f "$OUTPUT_FILE" ] ; then
    rm "$OUTPUT_FILE"
fi

for a in ${FREQS[*]}; do
    echo [Tuning to $a Hz] | tee -a "$OUTPUT_FILE"
    dvbtune -f $(($a-$LNB_FREQ)) -s $SYMBOL_RATE -p h -m -c $ADAPTER
-tone 0 2>1 >/dev/nul &
    DVBTUNE_PID=$!
    sleep 1
    scan-s2 -c -q -a $ADAPTER | tee -a $OUTPUT_FILE
    kill $DVBTUNE_PID >/dev/nul
done

Some longer lines above may be wrapped by your newsreader, so watch
out for that if cutting and pasting.

There is not much error checking in those scripts - I am intending
eventually to use the MythTV API to check if the DVB-S/S2 card is free
and lock and unlock it as necessary, but for now I just make sure it
is available manually.