[Gllug] tv tuner with hdmi input

[Andre Newman]

On 16 Dec 2009, at 13:27, Karanbir Singh wrote:

> On 12/10/2009 05:26 PM, Andre Newman wrote:
>> Being an Engineer for a moment; do you have good signal strength,
>> is your dish properly aligned, not damaged, trees overgrown although
>> that's usually a spring problem. Are your cables good quality (not
>> shotgun cable), water sealed at the dish, not rubbed through
>> somewhere  (sky love throwing cables over roofs) and good plugs
>> properly fitted at the Sky box end??
> 
> The only real 'metric' I have to go on at the moment is what is reported 
> by the sky box itself, which seems to indicate a very good signal, 

For my sins I have spent some time working with domestic satellite boxes! It's best to ignore the signal strength unless it's saying something very low or very high, even two identical boxes can read very differently from the same feed. The signal quality is sometimes meaningful, if that reads anything other than "lots" 90% 10-6 or however it's shown then you have a problem. Dish alignment or interference into the downlead are the most common, I'd say that the Sky people should have isolated these kind of problems but I spend a lot of time solving problems caused by Sky grade installers so it's very likely they wouldn't find an interference problem unless it was labelled in flashing ink or bit them in the bum.

> everytime I've looked. I am going to do some research and see if I can 
> somehow record ( snmp -> rrdgraph! ) the signal strength. Will post here 
> and let you guys know what I come up with.

If you have a PC card or USB satellite tuner femon is really useful, the actual numbers are BS but it will show changes over time and relative signal to noise across different transponders.

H'mm I like that idea, maybe someone has hooked up femon to snmp, might have to go play with that idea :-))


> 
> w.r.t cable - the cable distance from dish to sky box is just under 
> seven feet,

That's very short, although too much signal isn't likely, domestic boxes do go very wobbly when you hook them up to a 7M or even 3M dish but I doubt that's your problem. ;-)

> the cable looks solid (its the usual dual-core that they now 

If it's the two cores in a round outer, (shotgun cable) that stuff is a disaster, very likely to get pulse interference due to poor screening, it's massively high loss too. If it's only 7 feet away I'd be inclined to get a decent ready made cable and string it out of the window to a spare LNB output and see if the problems go away.

> use), no water logging around and connectors look and 'feel' good. Dish 
> alignment ? no idea - but given that the box reports a good connection 
> I'm guessing its fine.

You could try some channels on Astra (most sky channels) compared to some channels on Eurobird (Brit Shorts comes to mind), Eurobird is usually a little lower level but if it's massively lower your dish could do with a tweak.
I get about 30% to 60% level on my Sky box (setup then signal) and that's from an overspecced (by me) communal system that hangs in there though all weather.

Got a welding shop as a neighbour? Or as my Uncle found, a neighbour who specialises in Austin Seven maintenance (best in the country apparently, owns five of them himself), plays hell with my Uncle's Sky reception though!
You couldn't make that one up :-)

Andre
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