I have had an AZBox Premium Plus on order for many months. At first I had ordered a second standard Premium receiver, but the retailer I was working with got screwed over a bit and Opensat (or his wholesaler) sent him a load of Elites instead, so I was still waiting for him to get a shipment of Premiums when they announced the Premium Plus.
I emailed my retailer and asked him to upgrade the order to a Premium PLUS model. I am still waiting patiently.
Beyond this ordering dilemna, I primarily want the AZBox Premium PLUS because of the dual tuner option. You see, I plan to set up two separate motorized dishes. One for Ku Band and one for C Band as a "mini-BUD". Having dual tuners in one box versus two separate receiver units would please me for this purpose.
As for the blind scan capabilities, I guess I could live with a 5-10 minute scan time if the channel and TP accuracy was exceptional. Anything over 10 minutes is not very useful for feed hunting. Sure, it can be utilized, but it really detracts from the fun as you might miss out on a great deal of feed captures if you want to scan several sats searching for a game or a news program in a single sitting or during one evening or something like that. You would be spending most of your time watching the box scan rather than watching the programs.
It might not be so bad if you are trying to pull up a game that lasts for a couple of hours or more, but if you are trying to log an impromptu news item, you are going to miss most of it. Since I am more into following the news feeds as opposed to a sports feed, a long blind scan time would really be a detraction for me.
Watching TV in itself is not very high on my priority list, but if I have a FTA setup that was really good (or great) and have at least 24 channels that I am enthralled with so much that if I am stuck at home and inside due to bad weather, that I could have something to watch if I desired, then I would be very happy.
I guess my summation is, if OpenSAT can produce the PLUS with a fair balance between accuracy of the scan and time of the scan, that will be reasonable. However, if it is a 15 minute scan and the results are lame, then I will be very disappointed. Did I say very? How about extremely.
How about this NEW receiver...
It automatically aligns your motor and dish to every signal from the furthest eastern side of your horizon to the furthest west. It automatically knows the precise limits based upon your motor's hardware and set software limits if you need to set them. All you need to do is properly align the dish at the true south satellite for best reception there and the auto-blind-scan takes over.
It scans every 0.2 degrees of the horizon to seek out the maximum signal quality positioning of the motor, then scans each satellite for all bands and fine tunes the motor for the optimum reception on each TP. Once every satellite and TP is logged into its database, the receiver pans back across the horizon and detects (scans) all channels on the logged sats and TPs.
When the total scan is completed, it organizes all the satellites according to their orbital location in either ascending or descending order as well as every TP on those satellites.
When all the scanning and organizing is completed, the receiver selects the genres of all channels that you desire and sets up favorite lists for you automatically. You have to enter specific criteria during the initial setup of the receiver to enter the categories you desire for these fav groups, though. Such as language, and genre type etc. (In other words, you have to create the categories yourself, but the receiver will fill the categories with channels afterwards).
When your receiver is in standby mode, it constantly pans the horizon and searches for updates to all satellites for changes in TPs, symbol rates etc. It won't delete any entries, but will add new updates and then prompt you to save them when you turn the unit back on.
This receiver does all of this within the time that it requires your motor to pan from one end of your horizon to the other and then back again.
What an awesome receiver! Don't you wish that you had one? Don't you wish that something like this really existed? Me TOO!
RADAR
I emailed my retailer and asked him to upgrade the order to a Premium PLUS model. I am still waiting patiently.
Beyond this ordering dilemna, I primarily want the AZBox Premium PLUS because of the dual tuner option. You see, I plan to set up two separate motorized dishes. One for Ku Band and one for C Band as a "mini-BUD". Having dual tuners in one box versus two separate receiver units would please me for this purpose.
As for the blind scan capabilities, I guess I could live with a 5-10 minute scan time if the channel and TP accuracy was exceptional. Anything over 10 minutes is not very useful for feed hunting. Sure, it can be utilized, but it really detracts from the fun as you might miss out on a great deal of feed captures if you want to scan several sats searching for a game or a news program in a single sitting or during one evening or something like that. You would be spending most of your time watching the box scan rather than watching the programs.
It might not be so bad if you are trying to pull up a game that lasts for a couple of hours or more, but if you are trying to log an impromptu news item, you are going to miss most of it. Since I am more into following the news feeds as opposed to a sports feed, a long blind scan time would really be a detraction for me.
Watching TV in itself is not very high on my priority list, but if I have a FTA setup that was really good (or great) and have at least 24 channels that I am enthralled with so much that if I am stuck at home and inside due to bad weather, that I could have something to watch if I desired, then I would be very happy.
I guess my summation is, if OpenSAT can produce the PLUS with a fair balance between accuracy of the scan and time of the scan, that will be reasonable. However, if it is a 15 minute scan and the results are lame, then I will be very disappointed. Did I say very? How about extremely.
How about this NEW receiver...
It automatically aligns your motor and dish to every signal from the furthest eastern side of your horizon to the furthest west. It automatically knows the precise limits based upon your motor's hardware and set software limits if you need to set them. All you need to do is properly align the dish at the true south satellite for best reception there and the auto-blind-scan takes over.
It scans every 0.2 degrees of the horizon to seek out the maximum signal quality positioning of the motor, then scans each satellite for all bands and fine tunes the motor for the optimum reception on each TP. Once every satellite and TP is logged into its database, the receiver pans back across the horizon and detects (scans) all channels on the logged sats and TPs.
When the total scan is completed, it organizes all the satellites according to their orbital location in either ascending or descending order as well as every TP on those satellites.
When all the scanning and organizing is completed, the receiver selects the genres of all channels that you desire and sets up favorite lists for you automatically. You have to enter specific criteria during the initial setup of the receiver to enter the categories you desire for these fav groups, though. Such as language, and genre type etc. (In other words, you have to create the categories yourself, but the receiver will fill the categories with channels afterwards).
When your receiver is in standby mode, it constantly pans the horizon and searches for updates to all satellites for changes in TPs, symbol rates etc. It won't delete any entries, but will add new updates and then prompt you to save them when you turn the unit back on.
This receiver does all of this within the time that it requires your motor to pan from one end of your horizon to the other and then back again.
What an awesome receiver! Don't you wish that you had one? Don't you wish that something like this really existed? Me TOO!
RADAR
