Fisty McB
Member
- Joined
- Aug 11, 2012
- Messages
- 433
- Reaction score
- 630
- Points
- 93
- My Satellite Setup
- See my signature...
- My Location
- County Tyrone, N. Ireland
I'm in the middle of getting my dish farm updated - unfortunately the Freesat V8 Finder (aka V-71HD) I had is pretty much on it's way out. It had been left lying with the switch left in the on position which has crippled the battery, while the receiver itself is showing some big problems (22kHz tone not working at random times being the major one). So I decided to get a new one/upgrade and got myself its successor - the GT Media V8 Finder 2. I ordered it from AliExpress for £33.58 last Thursday evening with the promise of delivery within 5 working days. It arrived two days early (today) via Royal Mail, so far so good.
In terms of its outward features, the V8 Finder 2 is somewhat similar to its older brother with a familiar key layout (some keys have changed e.g. the "mute" button is in a different location) but with a grey plastic body instead of the yellow & blue body of the first V8 Finder. One notable change is that whereas the V8 Finder 1 had its USB-A socket and 12 Volt charging socket at the bottom of the device, the USB-A socket is now on the upper right side of the V8 Finder 2 and beside it is a USB-C socket for charging the battery. Among the accessories for the V8 Finder is a wall-charger with a USB-C socket along with two usb leads (one USB-C to USB-C and one USB-A to USB-C). The charger I got supplied is a two-pin European version which states it can charge at 5V, 9V & 12V. I haven't checked the capabilities of the charger in question yet, but using an Amazon Basics charger that supports Power Delivery, the receiver doesn't support PD but it did otherwise charge up at around 13-14 watts peak. Incidentally, GT Media claims to be using a 4000mAH battery in the V8 Finder 2 compared to a 3000mAH on the original. There is also a carry case with clip-on shoulder strap.
So far I've been spending today setting up the V8 Finder 2 using my setup currently in place, so I haven't gone outside yet to actually use it to receive anything yet! However, playing about with it shows it coming up with quite a few notable improvements over the original V8 Finder...
1. There is a built-in spectrum analyser that can scan across >1GHz of spectrum depending on band & polarity (H & V plus 22kHz tone or not, as we're used to in Europe) which can show either the RF or "actual" frequency on the scale, with zooming into a scale of 150MHz or 600MHz on offer as well.
2. The signal meter not only gives a percentage based strength & quality rating, but also gives values in more "professional" measures like the signal strength in dBu, Carrier to noise ratio & MER in dB, BER etc. as well as showing the modulation and FEC of the transmission received - I'm not sure if these latter values are dynamic or are stored at the time from the receiver scanned for signals.
3. There is a "loop" function which appears to cycle through four different carriers/transponders, presumably to allow you to monitor several signals at once (outside of the spectrum analyser). I haven't really tested this yet to see how useful it could be, but I guess it might be best for helping to align a dish or LNB that needs to find a "sweet sport" between two fairly close orbital positions e.g. 45E & 46E or 9E & 10E.
4. Using the blind scan function, the receiver in the V8 Finder 2 is able to pick up multistream channels from 33E & 5W, as well as the Spanish TDT channels on 30W. I haven't tried the multistream signals on 4.8E yet.
5. In the menus are a built in calculator for the compass direction, dish elevation & LNB skew required for a satellite you have saved in your user DB - you need to enter the local latitude & longitude to allow it to give you results (there's no built-in GPS receiver here).
6. There are other features available on the V8 Finder 2 that you'd perhaps expect to find on a cheap DVB-S2 receiver these days but not one you'd expect for a portable satellite meter, including a media player & PVR functions. There's something called "Online Movie App" but it seems you'll need a USB-based WiFi dongle to make use of that!
Overall, reception quality seems to be reasonably sensitive if not absolutely outstanding. First impressions are that for the price it appears to be a decent bargain, but the proof will be when using this in the wild, which should hopefully happen sometime this week. It is not a brand new model - the earliest firmware I could find was for December 2021 which means this receiver has been on the market for almost two years now, but I thought it might be of interest to some people here.
It should be noted that the receiver doesn't support UHD or 4K channels, nor does it support H.265/HEVC, but for a cheap satellite finder that's not really an issue IMO. It might support S2X, but I'm not completely sure.
The V8 Finder 2 came with firmware dated back to August this year - this was updated to the latest firmware dated 30th October 2023. There's no obvious difference from the firmware that it was originally shipped with, so was likely just a release to fix bugs. As can also be expected, there is a large list of satellites & transponders in the receiver database - I spent a good part of today curtailing these to get rid of satellites that are below the horizon here locally as well as those for C Band transmissions only, while also deleting transponder info on satellites already set up to receive and relying on blind scanning to fill up the transponder list on a satellite location with the latest data.
More from me on this later!
In terms of its outward features, the V8 Finder 2 is somewhat similar to its older brother with a familiar key layout (some keys have changed e.g. the "mute" button is in a different location) but with a grey plastic body instead of the yellow & blue body of the first V8 Finder. One notable change is that whereas the V8 Finder 1 had its USB-A socket and 12 Volt charging socket at the bottom of the device, the USB-A socket is now on the upper right side of the V8 Finder 2 and beside it is a USB-C socket for charging the battery. Among the accessories for the V8 Finder is a wall-charger with a USB-C socket along with two usb leads (one USB-C to USB-C and one USB-A to USB-C). The charger I got supplied is a two-pin European version which states it can charge at 5V, 9V & 12V. I haven't checked the capabilities of the charger in question yet, but using an Amazon Basics charger that supports Power Delivery, the receiver doesn't support PD but it did otherwise charge up at around 13-14 watts peak. Incidentally, GT Media claims to be using a 4000mAH battery in the V8 Finder 2 compared to a 3000mAH on the original. There is also a carry case with clip-on shoulder strap.
So far I've been spending today setting up the V8 Finder 2 using my setup currently in place, so I haven't gone outside yet to actually use it to receive anything yet! However, playing about with it shows it coming up with quite a few notable improvements over the original V8 Finder...
1. There is a built-in spectrum analyser that can scan across >1GHz of spectrum depending on band & polarity (H & V plus 22kHz tone or not, as we're used to in Europe) which can show either the RF or "actual" frequency on the scale, with zooming into a scale of 150MHz or 600MHz on offer as well.
2. The signal meter not only gives a percentage based strength & quality rating, but also gives values in more "professional" measures like the signal strength in dBu, Carrier to noise ratio & MER in dB, BER etc. as well as showing the modulation and FEC of the transmission received - I'm not sure if these latter values are dynamic or are stored at the time from the receiver scanned for signals.
3. There is a "loop" function which appears to cycle through four different carriers/transponders, presumably to allow you to monitor several signals at once (outside of the spectrum analyser). I haven't really tested this yet to see how useful it could be, but I guess it might be best for helping to align a dish or LNB that needs to find a "sweet sport" between two fairly close orbital positions e.g. 45E & 46E or 9E & 10E.
4. Using the blind scan function, the receiver in the V8 Finder 2 is able to pick up multistream channels from 33E & 5W, as well as the Spanish TDT channels on 30W. I haven't tried the multistream signals on 4.8E yet.
5. In the menus are a built in calculator for the compass direction, dish elevation & LNB skew required for a satellite you have saved in your user DB - you need to enter the local latitude & longitude to allow it to give you results (there's no built-in GPS receiver here).
6. There are other features available on the V8 Finder 2 that you'd perhaps expect to find on a cheap DVB-S2 receiver these days but not one you'd expect for a portable satellite meter, including a media player & PVR functions. There's something called "Online Movie App" but it seems you'll need a USB-based WiFi dongle to make use of that!
Overall, reception quality seems to be reasonably sensitive if not absolutely outstanding. First impressions are that for the price it appears to be a decent bargain, but the proof will be when using this in the wild, which should hopefully happen sometime this week. It is not a brand new model - the earliest firmware I could find was for December 2021 which means this receiver has been on the market for almost two years now, but I thought it might be of interest to some people here.
It should be noted that the receiver doesn't support UHD or 4K channels, nor does it support H.265/HEVC, but for a cheap satellite finder that's not really an issue IMO. It might support S2X, but I'm not completely sure.
The V8 Finder 2 came with firmware dated back to August this year - this was updated to the latest firmware dated 30th October 2023. There's no obvious difference from the firmware that it was originally shipped with, so was likely just a release to fix bugs. As can also be expected, there is a large list of satellites & transponders in the receiver database - I spent a good part of today curtailing these to get rid of satellites that are below the horizon here locally as well as those for C Band transmissions only, while also deleting transponder info on satellites already set up to receive and relying on blind scanning to fill up the transponder list on a satellite location with the latest data.
More from me on this later!
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