Technisat AirStar HD-5000

From MythTV

This card was previously known as the Air2PC 5'th generation

1 Description
2 Issues and Problems
3 Associated Software
4 Installation guides
5 FAQs
6 User Experiences
7 External Links

Description

Single-tuner TV card for 8-VSB (Over The Air) and unencrypted QAM-64 and QAM-256 (Cable) signals (i.e. Digital TV in ATSC countries).

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Issues and Problems

Antenna adjust mode (F7) will not allow you to adjust the your antenna with the help of a signal quality monitor with kernel versions before 2.6.20 (or possibly 2.6.19).

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Associated Software

The 2.6.15 version of the Linux kernel is the first to include full driver support for the HD-5000.

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Installation guides

Nothing yet ...

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FAQs

Q. When scanning for channels in mythtv-setup, why does Signal Ratio always says 0% and Signal/Noise always says 100%?

A. The current mainline driver version does not support providing the proper data for signal strength to users.

This issue appears to have been fixed in 2.6.20+ kernels.

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User Experiences

If you have this card, speak up! This is a good place to note your experiences - ease of install, what you like, what's not to like, etc.

Oct 2006 - Clean install of FC5/MythTV 0.20 (following http://www.wilsonet.com/) worked fine with 2 HD-5000 cards.

Jan 2007 - I've been having a hard time getting this card working properly in Gentoo Linux with the 2.6.18 and 2.6.19 kernels. Supposedly these cards should work fine in those kernels, but I get a huge amount of i2c error messages in syslog when trying to tune certain channels:

b2c2-flexcop: i2c master_xfer failed
lgdt330x: i2c_write_demod_bytes error (addr 02 <- 00, err = -121)
lgdt330x: i2c_read_demod_bytes: addr 0x59 select 0x58 error (ret == -121)
lgdt330x: i2c_read_demod_bytes: addr 0x59 select 0x1c error (ret == -121)
lgdt330x: i2c_read_demod_bytes: addr 0x59 select 0x38 error (ret == -121)
lg_h06xf: lg_h06xf_pll_set error (addr 21 <- 80, err = -121)

It does also state that the LGDT3303 Frontend is found and registered successfully upon booting. I can tune to a few HD channels and let it sit for a while, and it continues to say "FE_HAS_LOCK". On these channels, if I attempt to cat /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 into a test.mpg file, no matter how long I let it sit, the file is always empty (0 bytes). If I tune to certain other channels (I do not know what constitutes the difference, and why some have this behavior, and others do not), it will tune and LOCK successfully, but as soon as I try to access the /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 node, azap suddenly starts losing its signal lock (keeps going in and out basically), and that is when syslog starts spewing the above error messages. The one thing in common among the above messages is that the error code is 121, which is the value of the EREMOTEIO macro/error code. I haven't been able to trace which function the actual error starts in, but I'll make an update if I can track it down.

If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to comment. If there are others getting this same problem, please do speak up! As right now it seems like I am the only one having this problem.

July 2007 - Was able to get it work by first creating a channels.conf file and then importing the file using the mythtv-setup. Under "Input connections" Go to scan for channels then under "Scan Type" choose "Import channels.conf" type in the path to your channels.conf file.

July 2007 - Works great with 2.6.19.7, but starting with 2.6.20, it fails to tune.

This has been fixed as of 2.6.23-rc4. Search for "flexcop" in the changelog: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/testing/ChangeLog-2.6.23-rc4 You can also manually patch kernels, using the patch at: http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb/rev/0277da58bf56 With that patch, I'm now running 2.6.22.5.

September 2007 - MarcT - Gentoo 2007.0 (2.6.22-gentoo-r5 manually patched with http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb/rev/0277da58bf56)

Had been using 2.6.17 for months until I updated my systems completely for the SD patches. Works fine with this one simple patch. Got 3 cards working alongside a PVR-500, also using the kernel driver.

October 2007 - User NZRuss - MythTV 0.20.2 on Ubuntu Feisty 7.04, 2.6.20-16-generic Airstar HD-5000 Card installed fine and shows up with lspci, dmesg etc. Mythtv recognizes the card in setup but it won't scan. (Various sites reporting this as known issue (with kernel?) Currently looking at the patches mentioned, kernel upgrade or manually creating a channels.conf.... Was expecting a better experience. (am running along side 2x PVR-150's and want it for OTA (ATSC))

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