While waiting for a more advanced receiver than the microHD to come along (4K, etc), I’ve been wanting to buy a cheap second receiver as a backup. (OK, maybe a 10th receiver). Most have had pretty bad reviews. No one has said anything too bad about the FreeSat V7, so I thought I’d give one a try.
I haven’t had time to play with it in depth, but here are a few very quick observations made over the last week. I mainly use a receiver for blind scanning and channel surfing, so will likely not ever check out what else it can do. A lot of what I care about in a receiver may not be of interest to the average FTA user.
I paid $26.44, with free shipping. Once the package hit Los Angeles, the tracking number started working and it arrived in my rural mailbox 4 days after LA. Total time from ordering to arrival was 11 days.
Using the HDMI output, I connected the receiver to a computer monitor. I had video right away. I didn’t have the incompatible video format problem others mentioned. The default format was set to 1080i and Auto. (The options are: Auto, PAL and NTSC.)
The first problem I had was at power up the receiver would sometimes go into a boot loop. Surmising from what Brian said, I figured it didn’t like the current of my Ku Band dish farm (1 motor and 6 dishes on an 8 port switch). It didn’t have this problem with my BUDs, which are on a different cable, 3 LNBs on a 4 port switch. I had a 3 amp 12 volt power supply on hand and using that solved the boot loop problem. BTW, the power supply connecter is the same size and polarity as used on the microHD.
As others have said, it plays all the problematic channels on 101w without any problems. This is the main reason I purchased this STB. It also tunes in the KRBK mux on 99w without delay. My microHD can take 30 seconds or more to lock this mux.
Blind scan seems good. G19 Ku took 2 minutes exactly and found 220 TV and 67 radio channels ITC. AMC 21 Ku took 1 minute 55 seconds and found all of the PBS channels. It often scans in channels that are a bit too weak to play well, which I find a plus, but others may not.
In blind scans, it found the 16apsk mux on 97w C band and two 16apsk golf feeds on 103w Ku. It played these without any problems.
On each satellite the LNB voltage can be set to Auto, H, V, or off. So presumably it is possible to blind scan just one polarization, but I didn’t check to see if this worked.
Sensitivity seems just slightly better than the microHD. Signals that were pixelating slightly on the microHD were okay on the FreeSat V7. Signals were the Q bounces around a lot on the microHD had a solid Q on the FreeSat V7. But that could just be software, as the Q bar seemed slower to respond on the FreeSat V7.
Video quality seemed about the same between the two receivers. It doesn’t have the SD up conversion quality issue that some receivers have.
There are a number of features that the microHD has that are missing from the FreeSat V7:
There is no indication of the modulation type (QPSK, 8PSK, 16APSK) or FEC.
There is no indication of the video resolution (720p, 1080i, etc) of the received signal. In the channels list, HD channels are flagged with a HD symbol, but it wasn’t always accurate and isn’t of much use anyway.
When starting blind scans, there is no indication of the frequency range that will be scanned, so no ability to change it. Based on the channels scanned in, the ranges mostly seemed appropriate though. 3600 to 4200 MHz on C Band. With my extended C Band LNB it scanned channels from 4800 to well below 3800. I would have preferred that it stop at 4500 MHz.
These are some of the things I found annoying:
After a blind scan, the channels list returns to All, rather than the satellite that was just scanned.
On the remote, the satellite button is at the bottom right. I would prefer that it be near all of the other of my frequently used buttons: OK, Menu, Exit, Cursors, etc.
When bringing up the list of satellites, the cursor is always at the first satellite in the list, not at the currently selected satellite.
I noticed the Q blinking problem mentioned by gpflepsen. When moving to a new satellite, the signal would sometimes go in and out of lock, making it impossible to peak the dish on the signal. Changing to another channel seemed to stop this.
I haven’t used it to drive a motor, and I don’t have cascaded switches, so can’t comment on these.
I don’t do much recording, but tried a few in sequence and it seems to work. I made one two hour recording and it created a single file that played on a PC with both VLC and Windows Media Player. I didn’t try any of the other recording features.
Don’t know about the clock accuracy. I live in an area very prone to lightning and also live off grid. So I never leave electronics power up or connected to antennas when I’m not using them.
Satellites can be added or removed with the remote, same with individual transponders. I believe channels can also be renamed and moved around, but didn’t try that.
Pids can also be edited with the remote, but I could not get this to work. First I tried adding some of the hidden music channels on 103w Ku. When I scanned the entered pids, it said no program found. I then tried adding WCPE as the sound track to the beach cams, but got the same result. So I tried entering pids of an existing channel, just as they would be found on a blind scan. It didn’t complain about that, but what’s the point? It’s as if it won’t do anything that is different than what is defined in the tables. I did later get this to work using the PC editor. More about that in a bit.
Some geeky stuff: There are 3 low SR radio muxes on 99w. None of them were picked up on a blind scan. So I manually added 3773 H 2555. It locked the signal and was able to scan in the channels. Next I tried 3770 H 1220. It could lock the signal, but always failed to find any programming. I next tried 3742 H 741, but it complained about the SR being too low.
Over on 45w there is a radio mux at 11605 H 990. (China Radio International) The microHD can play this signal by using an SR of 1000 and repeatedly scanning it until it finds the tables. The FreeSat V7 could lock the signal, but I never could get it to scan in the channels. My WAG is that it times out on these low SR signals, be for the table is sent.
Next I down loaded the editor from the FreeSat website. It can add, delete, and reorder satellites, transponders and channels. Pretty basic, but seems to work well. I used the editor to add the hidden music channels on 103w Ku and it worked fine.
Next I added the low SR radio channels I mentioned and the receiver plays them fine. Even the one with an SR of 741.
Lastly I went over to 139w and did a blind scan there. Here the receiver fell apart. It didn’t find a single radio channel and half way through the scan completely locked up. I had to power cycle it, to get it back.
Over all I’m pretty happy with it. It does a few things my other receivers don’t. Other than the blind scan on 139w, it hasn’t hung up. And I haven’t managed to brick it yet.
