[mythtv-users] FTA channels on DishNetwork satellites

Joshua M Thompson funaho at jurai.org
Sun Mar 12 07:16:22 UTC 2006


On Sat, 2006-03-11 at 22:58 -0800, Chris Petersen wrote:

> I'm running into the same issues that others are, apparently (googling 
> comes up with several unanswered questions about similar scanning 
> issues).  I get a channel scan that finds a handful of named encrypted 
> channels, often listed several times, but the NASA channel (seemingly 
> the preferred FTA channel to test with) doesn't show up by name, and I 
> know that I'm getting nowhere near enough channels in the list (I get a 
> list of about 200, when lyngsat lists around 900).

The dupes may be caused by the way Dish sets up the spot beam
transponders; it causes duplicate transponder entries to be entered and
so every channel on those transponders is scanned multiple times. I
posted about this last year but the general feeling was that since it
only affected Dish, and since you can't technically use Dish legally
with Myth anyway it wasn't worth fixing. If you want to fix it you can
go through your transponders table and clean it up manually before doing
a channel scan. The dupes are easy to find because they'll have the same
frequency on the same satellite. Technically you should whack the ones
whose transponder numbers are for spot beams you can't receive, but it
doesn't really matter since Myth is only using the frequency anyway.

The lack of channels may be related to switching. The older Dish network
switches, including those built into some of the older dual LNBs, are
not diseqc compatible. The kernel drivers have some support for the
proprietary dish switches but from my experience many of the DVB-S cards
can't switch voltage fast enough to reliably operate those switches as
they require strict timing. I ended up just buying a diseqc switch since
most modern Dish receivers can operate them (Dish sells them as the
"Dish Pro" line of switches & LNBs, I believe, though I bought a generic
from the net.)

-- 
Joshua M Thompson <funaho at jurai.org>



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