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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clarkebelt" data-source="post: 1087680" data-attributes="member: 148422">First, let me try to explain the situation here, with the caveat that I am not employed in the satellite industry so some of this is my observations.  I've had a satellite dish for close to 20 years now and in that time I've picked up a little knowledge.Your characterization of FTA satellite broadcast over North America as being like the wild west isn't that far off.  The major difference is this:  My understanding is that in Europe, broadcasters intend for people to receive FTA satellite broadcasts, so they do things to make FTA user-friendly, like adhering to certain standards.In North America, however, there are few to no satellite signals that are broadcast with the intent that the end viewer will receive them directly.  If there are a few, they are primarily religious channels that would like home viewers to tune in so they can watch and (they hope) respond to appeals for money.  But the bulk of the television transmissions on satellite are there for one of two reasons.  Either it is a television network (large or small) sending signals to their local affiliate stations for rebroadcast, or it is a cable channel sending their signals to Cable TV headends.  In either case, all they care about is whether the intended recipients can receive the signals, and in such cases the uplinker often supplies the intended recipients with a proprietary receiver.  Most such transmissions are in fact scrambled, but enough aren't to make it worthwhile to have a dish (or two or three) if you live far enough out in the country that the local busybodies won't hassle you about it.The law in the United States is that as long as the signal is not scrambled you are free to receive and watch it, even if it's not intended for you.  The presumption is that if the uplinker doesn't want just anyone with a satellite receiver to receive their signal, they should scramble it.  It's very illegal to decode a scrambled signal if you are not paying for the service.  So most of the major cable channels do scramble their signals most of the time, and there is NO option to purchase them if you are receiving them on C or Ku band (there used to be for some of the channels many years ago, but now they have migrated everyone that wants to pay for TV to the very small dish services on Ka band, and there is NO free-to-air on the Ka satellites - you may find a "barker" channel for a particular satellite provider in the clear on Ka, but nothing anyone would want to watch day in and day out).So what you are left with on C and Ku bands is a royal mess.  There is no real consistency in anything.  On any given satellite, you can have scrambled channels next to data channels next to free-to-air (unscrambled) channels.  Saying they are non-standard-compliant is putting it mildly - the technicians that set these up probably aren't even aware there ARE any standards, and whatever they may be, they aren't followed over here because the government regulatory agencies don't require it.  I don't mean there are no rules whatsoever - obviously satellites must maintain their proper orbital location, and they cannot transmit outside of the normal frequency bands assigned for C or Ku band.  But other than that, it appears that the satellite owners are pretty much free to assign frequencies on their satellites any way they like.  And if you are an uplinker and you have paid for time on a satellite (whether that be only a few hours or 24/7 use of a particular channel), you are pretty much free to uplink using any format you like, as long as you stay within your assigned frequency range.And there is no one C or Ku Band satellite that is assigned to a single purpose, such a television or data or radio.  You can find all kinds of signals on all the satellites, but on any one satellite there will probably be relatively few free-to-air signals.Another thing different from Europe is that virtually none of these channels transmit EPG data.  Again, the signals aren't intended for direct reception by home viewers, and the equipment used to receive the signals at TV stations and cable headends wouldn't know what to do with guide data. I sometimes think that the only reason everything isn't scrambled is because of the expense, and the fact that many of the smaller stations and cable companies have no one on their engineering staff capable of tracking down and fixing an issue with the descrambling equipment.  So if something goes wrong, that station or cable headend can be without signal for a week or more, plus the uplinker has to pay to send out new equipment to the station or headend site, even though the only real problem may be that a station technician or employee twisted the wrong knob, or entered an incorrect value.In your other post, you wrote:My guess is that they are working off some kind of example configuration that contains those numbers.  Or, I can easily imagine that some of those uplinks were configured by guys who had no idea what that field was for, so they just tried "1" and it worked, and getting it working was all they cared about.  Who cares about a global registration if nobody is going to enforce it?  It's only a concern if they are sending a signal to a satellite that's far enough out over the Atlantic that it might actually be received in Europe.  The DVB rules don't apply to them, probably for the simple reason that neither the government regulators nor the satellite owner cares about enforcing them.So what is the solution?  For North America it's simple:  You simply assume that unless a channel is an EXACT duplicate - same satellite, same frequency, exact same information - then it is NOT a duplicate or moved channel.  99% of the time that would be a correct assumption in North America.  Channels rarely move, except when an old satellite is failing and they are forced to move (and nowadays they often just launch a new satellite and put it in the same orbital position and hot swap it).  What's a lot more common is for an unscrambled signal to suddenly become scrambled, though occasionaly the opposite happens - a previously scrambled signal becomes unscrambled.My suggestion would be to have a "North America" checkbox somewhere in the channel scan configuration, and if that's checked then you assume that no matter how much two channels may look alike, if they are not on the EXACT same frequency and satellite, then they are different channels.  That's the best idea I can come up with this late. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite22" alt=":sleep:" title="Sleep    :sleep:" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":sleep:" /></blockquote>

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