New Passion+ user review.

[The Wander]

Hope you all don’t mind as I’m new to this forum but this is an update to the Maplin Fortec package deal (sorry about a ‘Wall of Text’).

I bought this package from Maplin 4 days ago as a complete installation with a Fortec Star Passion+ receiver and dish for £159.99 (well the store manager also sold me a Maplin Catalogue for £3.99 then scanned the discount voucher inside for £5.00 off so I got the catalogue free and a pound off the price of the package, bargain).

For a first trial I connected the STB to my existing Sky dish and via HDMI to our 42” Vistron TV. Turning on gave me the choice of language, then area, but here was a problem, selecting South put the pin-tack in Cornwall and selecting West put the tack near Southampton, not a good start.

However I did a ‘best guess’, selected ‘UK and RIO’ channels and let the box start up, it found loads of channels but not Channel 5. The picture quality was good but a bit ‘washed out’, selecting BBC HD was excellent, quality was good, saturation good and clarity fine.

Further usage however turned up a few problems with the EPG and missing or out of sequence channels. Checking the firmware revealed a version from September last year so I came to this site to check out if it was possible to upgrade (and to find out what others thought of my purchase).

Last Thursday I downloaded the latest firmware from the Fortec site (p2_av110_20090107) and tried to do a flash update as advised on this forum (switch off box, insert USB stick, switch back on, hit OK button to load file). This did not work always returning a ‘Data Error’ on the STB display. After many fruitless tries and two USB sticks I gave up, then after reading the manual (always if it don’t work ) I tried the software loader from the menu, worked like a charm and now the box is running version 1.1.0 7th Jan 2009.

I can recommend the update as a number of niggling problems were solved with this version; the selection screen for your area is now text based and lists your correct location, the EPG works fine both for daily and weekly listings.
The picture quality has improved with better saturation and a slight but noticeable improvement to the focus of the picture, it seeming a bit sharper than before.

Channel 5 now lists in it’s correct place but Sky News had vanished (a small number of other channels had also vanished but they were of no concern to me), however this was fixed by setting the system to do a ‘Power Search’, simply setting the ‘Power Search Mode’ to ‘On’ from the ‘Other Settings’ menu, did a one time search while the STB was left on standby overnight and most of the missing channels including Sky News appeared in the channel listings.

Working out how to add channels to the (Fav.) button was a bit of fun but can be done as follows, first open the menu, select ‘Channel Lists’, input the pass code (0000 if still factory default), you will now have a full list of all the channels, select each channel using the (Mosaic) button (you can select one or more than one channel by putting the tick beside each channel).

Now you can either move the channels, typing in the channel number where you wish to go to will change the listing to that number or its nearest number, the number will appear near the top right of the ‘All Channels’ title bar, or add them to a favourites list. Once you have done all the adding and moving here you can exit and return to the normal screen, then use the (Fav.) button to list your new favourites list and do any fine tuning here.

The only downside for me is lack of Teletext service (the display icon shows teletext is available but it doesn’t work), and no Eurosport UK.

The dish was fun to assemble and erect but I used my old Sky dish pole and that worked fine, however the instructions that came with the dish leave a lot to be desired (an understatement) and there was no advice about the skew required on the LNB.

So far I’m pleased with my purchase having been with Sky for over 20 years (from analogue times ), and will probably cancel my Sky subscription as it’s had yet another price increase. And just to prove it’s not all the ‘young ones’ who can do this I’m well into my 60’s and retired so if your fed up with paying Sky and looking for a new set up have a look at this you might be surprised.

[Llew]

Hi there The Wander, welcome to the forum.

A nice description of your set-up, good to see you're getting value out of your Passion+.

You might consider adding value to your box by installing an extra (larger) dish and pointing to other satellites (Astra 19E and Hotbird 13E for instance) for receiving extra channels. Mostly European and encrypted, but still plenty of entertaining FTA channels available.

Llew