Skystar 2 Signal 50%, quality 50% - but no real signal

[zoltiz]

Installed the card and the antenna yesterday - Progfinder shows quality and signal strength both 50% for any satellite I choose. I aimed the dish using old sattv box and the signal strength that the box shows is 98%.

I am sure I am doing something wrong, but all night of reading manuals did not lead to anything.

Running:

Skystar2 PVR
WinXP
4.2.8 technisat drivers for Skystar2

Please point me in the right direction.

 

[rolfw]

50% signal and quality are normally satisfactory for reception of digital signals, also the readings are not totally accurate on the SS2 nor any of the stand alone receivers.

If you can do a channel scan and pick up channels, then that's fine. If you cannot scan any channels, then you may have the LNB information typed in incorrectly.

What is your setup, Is it a fixed dish, if it is, what satellite are you trying to receive?

What DVB software are you using, have you tried it with something like MyTheatre?

 

[zoltiz]

50% signal and quality are normally satisfactory for reception of digital signals, also the readings are not totally accurate on the SS2 nor any of the stand alone receivers.

I get 50% no matter what satellite I chose - so it's like 0% to me - and these 50% never change. So there must be a mistake in my setup somewhere.

If you can do a channel scan and pick up channels, then that's fine. If you cannot scan any channels, then you may have the LNB information typed in incorrectly.
What is your setup, Is it a fixed dish, if it is, what satellite are you trying to receive?

I do not pickup any channels. As for LNB info - I am using Satfinder to look for signal and I have it set for "Circular" and frequency is set to 11250. I don't see any other ways to tweak it so far. The dish came off DirecTV kit that's one of the 2 major sat providers here in the States. I heard that there is no way to receive DirecTV channels on the PC because of proprietary encoding, but my goal so far is to at least get a satellite fix and worry about encryption later. The ultimate goal is to use the same antenna to receive Echostar transmission which is not proprietary and PC-friendly.

I am a compelte newb to sat tv in general - so I have no idea what a fixed dish is. The dish is attached to my balcony and I got pretty skilled in aming it by hand even in this freezing weather

What DVB software are you using, have you tried it with something like MyTheatre?

DVB Softare:
ProgDVB - but I did not get to the point of setting it up yet, because even Satfinder does not show anything good (except for fake 50% bars)

I have Technisat's software installed (don't know the purpose of it or technical name, but the exe filenames are Setup4PC and Server4PC). Without this software the Satfinder says something in the area of "Error opening device". The Status button of Setup4PC software shows following Channel Information - Network: No information, Lock Status: In Lock, Signal Quality: 50%, SNR (d: 0.5 - The bad thing is that the display is the same whether the dish cable is plugged in or not.

Well. That was a long rant... It's fun exploring new things, but it also frustrating to feel like a blind kitten knowing nothing about this stuff...

Thank you for your help.

 

[rolfw]

I couldn't get satfinder to work, got similar results.

You should be able to use Setup4pc to find a satellite, set up a new one and add a new transponder, must be one on a satellite that can be easily received, preferably H or V polarisation.

 

[zoltiz]

Got everything working. It was a hardware issue. Moved the card to a different PCI slot and got a completely different story. What prevented me from doing it in the beginning is that windows actually found the card even in the first slot... Now everything seems perfect.


Thanks!