- June 8, 2014
- 57
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United States of America
I just wanted to post a very short mini-review of these two cards here. Note that I did not attempt to use the remote control that came with either card, and that these tuners are being used at a location in the USA.
The Prof Revolution S2 7301 card is an excellent single-tuner card that for the most part just works. You install the drivers and go. It seems to have no problems tuning channels and it fully supports DiSEqC 2.0 and 22 kHz tone switches (to the extent that MediaPortal supports them, anyway). But there is one glaring issue with this card: The Windows drivers will only allow you to install one such card in any Windows box. If you like the card so much that you buy and install a second one, it simply will not work. The Windows drivers are apparently totally incapable of recognizing that second card. Who designs software so that if a customer really likes your product they cannot benefit by buying another?
The problem is compounded by the fact that it seems that Prof driver development ceased about three or four years ago and now there is no one connected with that company that is even capable of writing a new driver. So now I have two perfectly good Prof 7301's sitting in the boxes gathering dust, after being used for only about 1-3 weeks, because the dummies at that company just apparently never considered that a customer might want to use two identical model Prof Tuner cards in the same system.
So my thought process was, in order to avoid this issue, get a card with multiple tuners on it. So next I installed a TBS6985 DVB-S2 Quad Tuner card. Well, that solved one issue but created others. This card was not nearly as easy to get working. The first thing I discovered was that it did not like my DiSEqC 2.0 switches. I could connect individual LNB's to each tuner and they worked fine (or at least the C-band ones did) but the minute I introduced the DiSEqC switches, everything screeched to a grinding halt. That was solved by the use of some patched drivers from this thread.
But then I discovered another issue - while the cards appeared to tune C-band just fine, for some reason they will not tune Ku-band directly. There is a hack you can use, where you fool the tuner into thinking it's using a C-band LNB when it's really connected to a Ku-band LNB, but it's not very intuitive and requires a bit of math. I don't know if this is an issue with the drivers, or the tuner itself, or what.
Another issue I have noticed with the TBS tuner is that sometimes, especially if you are trying to watch a channel live, the stream will fail after a few seconds the first time you try to tune it in. If you then immediately try it again it almost always works.
TBS gives you a little power cable with this card and I suggest you use it. Even though it may have the same connector as some connectors off your power supply, I have read some threads that suggest you use this cable anyway. Otherwise, when all four tuners are in use it may draw more power than the PCI-E bus can supply. My opinion of this card is that it isn't a bad card, but it isn't quite as good as the Prof 7301.
The real issues with both of these cards seem to be more related to the drivers than the hardware. I was told that if you are running Linux you actually can get two Prof 7301's to work on the same system, but that is not something the average user can do - you pretty much have to be a Linux guru to make that work. I think that the Prof drivers could probably be fixed to allow two cards to work on the same system, if someone had access to the source code, and I suspect that the issues with tuning Ku with the TBS card is also simply a driver issue. I'm personally not a coder so I would have no way to fix such things.
At the moment, it is the TBS6985 card that has come closest to giving us the full multiple tuner operation I wanted (and I would say we are more than 95% of the way there). However, if I only wanted to run a single-tuner system I would go with the Prof 7301 card in a heartbeat.
So that is my review of the Prof 7301 and TBS6985 cards. By the way, the Prof 7301 is a PCI card, while the TBS6985 is a PCI-E (PCI Enhanced) card, in case that makes any difference to anyone.
The Prof Revolution S2 7301 card is an excellent single-tuner card that for the most part just works. You install the drivers and go. It seems to have no problems tuning channels and it fully supports DiSEqC 2.0 and 22 kHz tone switches (to the extent that MediaPortal supports them, anyway). But there is one glaring issue with this card: The Windows drivers will only allow you to install one such card in any Windows box. If you like the card so much that you buy and install a second one, it simply will not work. The Windows drivers are apparently totally incapable of recognizing that second card. Who designs software so that if a customer really likes your product they cannot benefit by buying another?
The problem is compounded by the fact that it seems that Prof driver development ceased about three or four years ago and now there is no one connected with that company that is even capable of writing a new driver. So now I have two perfectly good Prof 7301's sitting in the boxes gathering dust, after being used for only about 1-3 weeks, because the dummies at that company just apparently never considered that a customer might want to use two identical model Prof Tuner cards in the same system.
So my thought process was, in order to avoid this issue, get a card with multiple tuners on it. So next I installed a TBS6985 DVB-S2 Quad Tuner card. Well, that solved one issue but created others. This card was not nearly as easy to get working. The first thing I discovered was that it did not like my DiSEqC 2.0 switches. I could connect individual LNB's to each tuner and they worked fine (or at least the C-band ones did) but the minute I introduced the DiSEqC switches, everything screeched to a grinding halt. That was solved by the use of some patched drivers from this thread.
But then I discovered another issue - while the cards appeared to tune C-band just fine, for some reason they will not tune Ku-band directly. There is a hack you can use, where you fool the tuner into thinking it's using a C-band LNB when it's really connected to a Ku-band LNB, but it's not very intuitive and requires a bit of math. I don't know if this is an issue with the drivers, or the tuner itself, or what.
Another issue I have noticed with the TBS tuner is that sometimes, especially if you are trying to watch a channel live, the stream will fail after a few seconds the first time you try to tune it in. If you then immediately try it again it almost always works.
TBS gives you a little power cable with this card and I suggest you use it. Even though it may have the same connector as some connectors off your power supply, I have read some threads that suggest you use this cable anyway. Otherwise, when all four tuners are in use it may draw more power than the PCI-E bus can supply. My opinion of this card is that it isn't a bad card, but it isn't quite as good as the Prof 7301.
The real issues with both of these cards seem to be more related to the drivers than the hardware. I was told that if you are running Linux you actually can get two Prof 7301's to work on the same system, but that is not something the average user can do - you pretty much have to be a Linux guru to make that work. I think that the Prof drivers could probably be fixed to allow two cards to work on the same system, if someone had access to the source code, and I suspect that the issues with tuning Ku with the TBS card is also simply a driver issue. I'm personally not a coder so I would have no way to fix such things.
At the moment, it is the TBS6985 card that has come closest to giving us the full multiple tuner operation I wanted (and I would say we are more than 95% of the way there). However, if I only wanted to run a single-tuner system I would go with the Prof 7301 card in a heartbeat.
So that is my review of the Prof 7301 and TBS6985 cards. By the way, the Prof 7301 is a PCI card, while the TBS6985 is a PCI-E (PCI Enhanced) card, in case that makes any difference to anyone.
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