Installed new TBS6985 DVB-S2 tuner card and DiSEqC switch won't work, + other issues (1 Viewer)

[clarkebelt]

Sorry. It now shows "band:Circular"

And as far as I know the name of the channel is unique. I both deleted the original channel entry and also changed an incorrect name that appeared inside the channel block, that if left unchanged might have indeed not been unique.

 

[mm1352000]

Okay, that's a little better... but still the run graph error. This is getting crazy.

Can you please try band type 3. If that doesn't work I'm stumped..

 

[clarkebelt]

mm1352000, nothing I have tried tonight would make that channel come in. UNTIL I remembered something you had said previously, at an earlier point in this discussion:

Hello again

I haven't got time to go through the information in detail right now. Just wanted to say that a tuner driver can't tell the difference between a Ku and C band signal in the cable. They're both heterodyned down to the same intermediate frequency range (= 950 to 2150 MHz) in the cable. Blind scan results will be interpreted and displayed based on the information you supply. So, if you supply Ku band parameters the results will appear to be Ku band; if you supply C band the results will appear to be C band.

In other words, what you're seeing as Ku band signals on DiSEqC A and B are your C band signals, just interpreted as Ku.

Example:
Port A 11727V (as shown, first result in your first screenshot).
11727 - 10750 = intermediate frequency in cable = 977 MHz
C band equivalent = 5150 - 977 = 4173 MHz
Do you have a transponder at that frequency on the satellite from port A?

On port C you should be able to see differences in the results depending on whether you scan high or low band.

Got to run.

mm

So I got to thinking about this and realized that this tuner apparently has no problem tuning C-Band, and in fact all those Ku channels are set to C-band for some reason, until I changed that one tonight. So I got to thinking, what if I set it back to C-band as it originally was? If the Ku signal I'm trying to get is at 11840, and the intermediate frequency is 10750, then the difference is 1090. If I then take 5150 (the C-band intermediate frequency) and subtract 1090, the result is 4060. So, I changed the channel's frequency from 11840000 to 4060000. And guess what? The channel is coming in just fine!

While I don't really want to have to recalculate every frequency, at least I can make them work this way, although I am so tired right now I will probably do the rest tomorrow. But I at least wanted to let you know about this because it eliminates some possibilities.

Thanks for all your help, and sorry I have such weird issues!

 

[mm1352000]

Argh! How could I not have seen this before!
How did you create these channels? I assumed you had scanned everything in somehow, but I guess not...
The frequencies are meant to be in units of kHz, not Hz. So your channel at 11840000 should be 11840.
Sorry, it is so easy to miss the three extra zeroes.
That should be applied to all channels...

[edit: ...and then you should be able to go back to using your tone switch, with LNB LOFs enabled and values set to 5150, 10750, 11000... or skip the tone switch and set band to 2 for all C band channels and 1 for all Ku band channels.]

 

[clarkebelt]

Argh! How could I not have seen this before!
How did you create these channels? I assumed you had scanned everything in somehow, but I guess not...
The frequencies are meant to be in units of kHz, not Hz. So your channel at 11840000 should be 11840.
Sorry, it is so easy to miss the three extra zeroes.
That should be applied to all channels...

Normally I would not doubt anything you say but are you SURE about that? I just checked several WORKING channels and they ALL have the three zeroes at the end of the frequencies. That includes ones I scanned in (which was most of them initially) and the very few that I added manually. And this one I am using for testing was not originally added manually, it was scanned in. And I find the extra three zeroes present in both the TV Server configuration and in the exported XML file.

I know that most were scanned in that way because there are certain channels that got scanned in that I would NEVER have added manually, but I never got around to deleting them. All the C-Band ones have frequencies like 3860000, not 3860. So if adding three extra zeroes is wrong, then the scan software is doing it wrong!

Even on the channels I created (because they didn't get properly scanned or were overwritten by a scan of a previous satellite) I was very careful to follow the same format I had seen on the scanned-in channels. Perhaps you are confusing Frequency with Symbol Rate? Because on all the scanned in channels the Frequency has the extra zeroes but the Symbol Rate doesn't.

If what you say is true, then not a single channel should be working on any band for me right now, because every single one of them has the extra zeroes. So I am REALLY confused about this!

 

[clarkebelt]

After changing all those frequencies to equivalent C-band frequencies, and making sure the band type is set to C-band (band="2" in the xml import file), they worked. When the band type was set to Circular (band="1") and the originally scanned frequencies were used, they did not work. This is only true with the TBS card, I did NOT have this problem with the Prof 7301. So my guess now is that the patched drivers that allow the use of a DiSEqC switch somehow don't handle Ku correctly.

Until this is fixed (hopefully that will happen at some point), for anyone else that might be having this issue, the way to convert a Ku-band frequency (from a standard Ku-band LNB, not a universal one) to the equivalent pseudo-C-band frequency is:

Take the Ku-band frequency and subtract 10750 (10750 is the intermediate frequency of a standard Ku-band LNB)
Take the result and subtract it from 5150 (so, 5150 - the result you obtained above)

That result is your pseudo-C-band frequency. But remember that for this to work the band type for the channel must be changed to C-band, and for some reason that is the one thing you can't change in the channel editor (I wish you could, or could at least see the current setting there, because it would have been helpful in figuring out what was going on earlier in this process). What you can do, assuming you can understand the format of an XML file, is export all the channels to an XML file, then using a text editor remove all the channels that are not affected, change the band on those that are affected to band="2" (and change the frequencies to the equivalent C-band frequencies if you haven't done that already), and save the changes (preferably to a different filename so you have a backup of all your channels in case you have messed something up). Then go back into TV Server and delete the original channels, and import the changes. TV server will probably still complain that you have duplicate entries even after you have deleted the original channels, but there is nothing that can be done to make that warning go away as far as I can tell, so just import the changed channels. Note that when you do this you may need to re-map any channel associations (such as for guide data).

I would also guess that if you have never scanned a satellite and you want to scan a new one, and scanning it as Ku-band circular doesn't work (I would always try that first!), you can always try scanning it as C-band. If that works it will scan in the pseudo-C-band frequencies right from the start. This is certainly not an ideal method but if you are having this issue with a TBS card it may be your only workaround for now.