smashingsat
New Member
- Joined
- Aug 8, 2022
- Messages
- 9
- Reaction score
- 8
- Points
- 3
- Age
- 54
- My Satellite Setup
-
Gilbertini 1.5m dish
Invacom Fiber LNB
3 x Promax CompactMax receivers (for Hotel TV setup)
- My Location
- Carcassonne, Southern France
Hi there.
This is partly a review of some excellent commercial equipment that works well for a hotel TV system, or high-end multi-room homes, and partly a question about consumer equipment we are looking to buy (and are less familiar with). Am hoping some of the fine folks and experts here can help with the latter question.
My business is currently operating three commercial Promax CompactMax-2 units for a hotel TV system at a high end location in Southern France. These (pricey) units are superb, and allow for transmodulating 4 satellite transponders per unit, to DVB-T2 frequencies (as DVB-T2 muxes). This means they can be viewed on any TV, and distributed easily with a single coax cable around the property.
With 3 Promax units in operation, I can decode any 12 transponders, on one or more satellites, and with the current setup these 12 transponders are spitting out a bouquet of 50 TV channels over DVB-T2 - a mix of HD and SD, UK, US and French channels - across all the rooms in the property.
Currently the channel setup consists of a mix of UK/US FTA channels (via 28 east), and French encrypted channels (via 5 west) from Fransat, with the French channels decoded using commercial Fransat Pro cards in the Promax's CAM slots.
Of interest, each Fransat Pro card can descramble 8 channels simultaneously, so up to 24 descrambled HD channels in total with our setup of 3 Fransat Pro cards. Fortunately all of the key French channels can be found on just 3 transponders, leaving 9 transponders available on the Promax units, for Astra 28.2 east channels.
It being that time of year, where 28 east reception goes south (or rather... north), I am doing my annual configuration jig, and the inevitable upgrades and tweaks to eke out pulling in the UK FTA channels more reliably. The property has a 1.5m Gilbertini dish for 28 east, but this is not enough in the summer months for the UK spot beams, where the property is located. Until we switch this dish out for a (likely) 2.7m dish next year, I'm looking at other options.
Thanks to this forum I recently became aware of Kabelio's consumer DTH service in Europe, and since we have an address in Switzerland we can use for testing, I've been able to get my hands on a consumer Kabelio CI access module, and activate it for experimentation.
The problem I'm hitting up against is that the Kabelio consumer CAM is CI+, and due to the massive parallel processing that would be required for CI+ in a commercial receiver like the Promax units, commercial equipment like the Promax units avoid CI+ entirely, and simply use the older CI standard for decoding. This is fine for commercial operations, as commercial CAM's like the Fransat Pro cards (with 8 services decoded in parallel) use CI, whereas for purposes of comparison, Fransat consumer cards (1 or 2 services in parallel) use CI+.
The temporary solution I'm looking at is to implement 4 consumer satellite receivers (single tuner each), with a Kabelio CAM module in each, to provide BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV and Channel 4 reliably off Hot Bird, and then use 4 x Triax MOD103T HDMI-to-DVB-T modulators, to piggyback these channels onto the DVB-T/T2 distribution system at the property.
Since the Promax units allow for completely flexible LCN allocation for channel numbers, and completely flexible frequency allocation for the DVB-T2 muxes, as do the Triax units, I can simply swap out the LCN's basically, and configure everything so that the 4 UK services slot right into the Hotel TV system, onto the same channel numbers as before. With the TV's we have, this requires a simple rescan of the individual DVB-T mux frequency, to repopulate those channels on the TV's, but we have a well trod system in place for this.
We already use the same Triax HDMI-to-DVB-T units for adding on some extra TV channels, in addition to the Promax channels, e.g. for an in-house TV channel, a 'beauty-cam' camera, and the occasional sports broadcast channel off a consumer receiver, strictly for private use of course.
Can anyone on the board recommend a rock solid reliable, single tuner satellite receiver, with CI+ slot, that has no annoying features like non-bypassable energy saving shutdown, or silly pop up messages that appear on screen from time to time, which I can use for this purpose? It needs to operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, just like the Promax units.
If there were a dual tuner satellite receiver with two HDMI outputs (one per tuner), that would be an improvement on the requirement, but I don't think these exist.
Thanks in advance, and I'd be happy to answer any questions about the commercial Promax units, the Triax units, and the concept of DVB-T2 muxing in general, for communal supply.
This is partly a review of some excellent commercial equipment that works well for a hotel TV system, or high-end multi-room homes, and partly a question about consumer equipment we are looking to buy (and are less familiar with). Am hoping some of the fine folks and experts here can help with the latter question.
My business is currently operating three commercial Promax CompactMax-2 units for a hotel TV system at a high end location in Southern France. These (pricey) units are superb, and allow for transmodulating 4 satellite transponders per unit, to DVB-T2 frequencies (as DVB-T2 muxes). This means they can be viewed on any TV, and distributed easily with a single coax cable around the property.
With 3 Promax units in operation, I can decode any 12 transponders, on one or more satellites, and with the current setup these 12 transponders are spitting out a bouquet of 50 TV channels over DVB-T2 - a mix of HD and SD, UK, US and French channels - across all the rooms in the property.
Currently the channel setup consists of a mix of UK/US FTA channels (via 28 east), and French encrypted channels (via 5 west) from Fransat, with the French channels decoded using commercial Fransat Pro cards in the Promax's CAM slots.
Of interest, each Fransat Pro card can descramble 8 channels simultaneously, so up to 24 descrambled HD channels in total with our setup of 3 Fransat Pro cards. Fortunately all of the key French channels can be found on just 3 transponders, leaving 9 transponders available on the Promax units, for Astra 28.2 east channels.
It being that time of year, where 28 east reception goes south (or rather... north), I am doing my annual configuration jig, and the inevitable upgrades and tweaks to eke out pulling in the UK FTA channels more reliably. The property has a 1.5m Gilbertini dish for 28 east, but this is not enough in the summer months for the UK spot beams, where the property is located. Until we switch this dish out for a (likely) 2.7m dish next year, I'm looking at other options.
Thanks to this forum I recently became aware of Kabelio's consumer DTH service in Europe, and since we have an address in Switzerland we can use for testing, I've been able to get my hands on a consumer Kabelio CI access module, and activate it for experimentation.
The problem I'm hitting up against is that the Kabelio consumer CAM is CI+, and due to the massive parallel processing that would be required for CI+ in a commercial receiver like the Promax units, commercial equipment like the Promax units avoid CI+ entirely, and simply use the older CI standard for decoding. This is fine for commercial operations, as commercial CAM's like the Fransat Pro cards (with 8 services decoded in parallel) use CI, whereas for purposes of comparison, Fransat consumer cards (1 or 2 services in parallel) use CI+.
The temporary solution I'm looking at is to implement 4 consumer satellite receivers (single tuner each), with a Kabelio CAM module in each, to provide BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV and Channel 4 reliably off Hot Bird, and then use 4 x Triax MOD103T HDMI-to-DVB-T modulators, to piggyback these channels onto the DVB-T/T2 distribution system at the property.
Since the Promax units allow for completely flexible LCN allocation for channel numbers, and completely flexible frequency allocation for the DVB-T2 muxes, as do the Triax units, I can simply swap out the LCN's basically, and configure everything so that the 4 UK services slot right into the Hotel TV system, onto the same channel numbers as before. With the TV's we have, this requires a simple rescan of the individual DVB-T mux frequency, to repopulate those channels on the TV's, but we have a well trod system in place for this.
We already use the same Triax HDMI-to-DVB-T units for adding on some extra TV channels, in addition to the Promax channels, e.g. for an in-house TV channel, a 'beauty-cam' camera, and the occasional sports broadcast channel off a consumer receiver, strictly for private use of course.
Can anyone on the board recommend a rock solid reliable, single tuner satellite receiver, with CI+ slot, that has no annoying features like non-bypassable energy saving shutdown, or silly pop up messages that appear on screen from time to time, which I can use for this purpose? It needs to operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, just like the Promax units.
If there were a dual tuner satellite receiver with two HDMI outputs (one per tuner), that would be an improvement on the requirement, but I don't think these exist.
Thanks in advance, and I'd be happy to answer any questions about the commercial Promax units, the Triax units, and the concept of DVB-T2 muxing in general, for communal supply.
