FreeSat.

[charles]

It would also need to be a lot higher. I suspect the CAA might object.

[T i m]

<snip>

Well, I think anything new you explore can certainly be interesting and then it's rewarding to know a bit about what it is or what you are doing and then being able to do it for both yourself (because you want the solution) or for others, be it simply to help friends and family or as you did, for a living.

Most of the places I've worked have been pretty good with the training so that's nice to get paid to learn how to do something but at the same time they couldn't teach / show you every scenario so you had to stay on your toes for much of the rest.

When working for Kodak for example (on Microfilm / fiche machines) they cave you training on the basic machines and then you went out and serviced / repaired those. However, a customer with a faulty machine (near the one you were called out to) that you hadn't actually trained on didn't know you weren't trained on it so we were allowed to take a look at the machine but only after we had made the customer aware of the situation. No customer ever then refused.

In most cases of course we would be able to fix it (most of the faults were operator error) and so that was a bit more you learned about another machine.

And that sort of thing / solution was fairly common amongst the tech's (there was quite a team in London) because they were fairly strict re the 'particular set of skills' <g> we had before taking us on.

You may have had to be on your toes more often, given the wide range of gear you were expected to 'fix'?

For most of my career the gear I was looking at was (mostly [1]) gear we had sold or even manufactured.

Cheers, T i m

[1] Datacomms gear, so whilst we were primarily working on 'our' stuff, we also had to interface with other peoples gear, just as you might if say installing a replacement video recorder and then having to tune / configure their TV to watch it, or setting up a community system and connecting / configuring all their kit to suit?

[williamwright]

Sometimes, just out of curiosity, when I've been extremely elevated (make of that what you will) I've attempted to receive TV signals from a long way away. The limiting factor is usually CCI.

Bill

[tim...]

You're right

the stuff that I watch on channels such as Talking Pictures (and Forces TV [1]) are all programs that have been previously shown on the main (2) channels

from 40 YEARS AGO!

silly me for not watching it then!

tim

[1] Forces TV has a catch up service if you are military personnel on a base, not for public consumption

[SH]

and angular separation of teh two TX's the beamwidth of the antennas used and whether a stacking harness is used?

[tim...]

Nope

it's filtering them out because they aren't the channels in the FS Marketing club

No idea why it's not finding the ones it wants though

Is the dish pointing in the right direction, I think Dave said it was motorised, but presumably that still needs manually setting up first.

[SH]

Did you ever attempt to use a Yagi to recieve UHF signals from a TV satellite? :-)

[williamwright]

Well, yes, but you can't work miracles.

Bill

[Richard]

Humax Freesat HDR-1100S.

[Dave Plowman (News]

Yes it mentions postcode. It is correct in the TV menu - and even added my street name and house number.

Could it get the postcode off the internet? I notice things like Google think I'm in a nearby post code.

[Dave Plowman (News]

Yes. With only one satellite showing in the menu (Astra 28) the setup menu for 'other' shows 100%. And motor switched off. Think it would be odd if selecting FreeSat made it move the dish off Astra 28.

>

[The Natural Philosopher]

Never took that long for me when I had a 'dish'

[NY]

Is there anything sinister about the fact that it is only showing one satellite, Astra 28? Maybe that entry is shorthand for Astra 2E/2F/2G which have different transponders and therefore channels. Are Astra 2E/2F/2G actually the same physical satellite with transponders in the lower, middle and upper parts of the frequency band respectively? Or are they three different satellites that are located so they appear to be in the same part of the sky? Are all three 2E/2F/2G the same power and the same beam pattern? Are all the transponders the same power?

[Andy Burns]

No.

As Bill said, the satellites are so close at the 28.2E orbital position, that they look like one larger signal.

[NY]

But is the beam pattern of each of the 2E/2F/2G satellites the same? Are there some transponders, on one satellite, which are weaker than those from another satellite, as you move further north or further south?

[Andy Burns]

I don't remember DVBscan on linux taking so long, but TVheadend does.

[NY]

Yes it does. I'm not sure whether it's because there is a long just-in-case timeout before the tuner is allowed to scan the next multiplex (ie probably a lot of idle time) or whether the tuner is busy scanning right up to the moment that it is released ready for the next mux.

When I first set up TVHeadend (and I've had to do it three times*) I resign myself to a long wait, with occasional progress checking, when it is scanning the satellite decoder. In contrast, scanning the six muxes that I can receive by terrestrial takes a lot less time *even per multiplex* (without factoring in that there are a hell of a lot more satellite muxes than terrestrial ones.

Does the scanning process get the list of multiplexes/transponders by reading the SI table from an initial "seed" mux? I thought (for both terrestrial and satellite) it used a hard-coded list of transponders, maybe with minor tweaks overnight once the initial file-based scan had completed.

Certainly the SI list is used, because even through I've removed a couple of multiplexes (10758V and 11954H) that no longer exist, they reappear at the next overnight scan - always with zero services. And I can see that the SI table does still contain reference to them - by examining a mux with TSReader, a brilliant tool for the inner-nerd within me ;-)

(*) Once when I set up my original Raspberry Pi, then again when I changed to a different Pi, and a third time on the new Pi after a kernel upgrade buggered-up the satellite tuner and I had to reinstall Linux from scratch.

[Dave Plowman (News]

If I had an elevation error on the dish, might it be possible to get some but not all of them?

[T i m]

Yes. If you are getting any of them at any point on the movement of the dish then the elevation is right for those ... but the elevation (/declination) either side of that could be wrong if the polar mount isn't set up correctly?

Cheers, T i m

[williamwright]

No.

Bill