Coolsat 7100 miCroPVR - Preliminary review and questions

[Pepper]

Well my Christmas toy finally arrived yesterday. It's a brand new Coolsat 7100. I will write a full review of this soon. In the meantime, I thought I'd share some initial thoughts and issues.

First, the good stuff.

- USALS works great for automagically positioning the motor, once I told it where I'm located. The exceptions seem to be a few satellites near the ends of the arc which have to be adjusted slightly and locked down with DiSEqC 1.2. I think this tells me my motor or dish is not 100% aligned correctly.

- The box came preprogrammed with almost all the existing satellites from 61W to 148W, with separate "C" and "Ku" entries for those that do both.

- The PVR and trick modes appear to work pretty well, though they make the DishDVR look like advanced technology by comparison. The box will build a live-tv buffer and store recordings on an attached USB device, either a hard drive or a memory stick. The format is FAT32. I haven't yet tried retrieving the recorded files to see if they are playable on a computer. There are two USB ports, one on the front and one on the back, and only one can be active at a time. You can configure which one, or let the box figure it out.

- It has a nice display that shows what the box is currently doing "SCANNING" or what you're watching "UNIV. NETWORK DR. GENE SCOTT" - there are only 8 characters in the display so it scrolls the longer stuff.

- Optical and Coax outputs for digital audio. I can hear PBS in Dolby Digital.

- The box is smaller than I expected, even smaller than the Microyal MRX-1000 it's replacing.

- Works with Slingbox! See attached file in post #4 below.

Now, the bad stuff.

- There doesn't appear to be a way to edit the positions of existing or user defined satellites which means if you want to use USALS with those you're out of luck.

I'm looking for a way to edit satellites and transponders offline. I think ChannelMaster is what I want but I seem to be overlooking what it takes to make it work with a Coolsat. Even if it can be done, does ChannelMaster support changing the USALS positioning?

 

[qwert1515]

The new Coolsats (6100 and up) are not supported by Channel Master because Coolsat is not giving the information on their new channel format to the programmers that work on Channel Master. (The reason I went with the older 6000 model without warranty )

I think I have heard that there is a Coolsat editor, I have looked around but I can not find it anywhere at the time

EDIT - I found the loader and editor for the 7000 but not the 7100, the editor should work but I am not sure about the loader.

 

[Anole]

two peas in a pod ?

Pepper -
Thanks for getting one of those and describing it.
I thing the main difference between it and the popular Visionsat IV200, is you have a built-in buffer, and we don't.

You might scan the IV200 review thread and see if you agree or disagree with what you find there.
I'll certainly agree that while the PVR functions are quuite nice, they're not quite up to my Dish 508.

I've put a small 60gb external hard drive on my IV200.
It's based on a 2.5" laptop drive , and is totally powered through the data cable.
That's handy when I want to take video off it at my laptop - just plug 'n suck.

I had no trouble reading the files with VideoReDo, and making DVDs from 'em.
I think there is a header on each video file, so if you edit and load it back to the drive, the PVR won't recognize nor play it.
When I've made some progress on that, we'll try it on your Coolsat, too.

Let us hear more.

 

[Pepper]

I found an editor. It works with Slingbox too!

Yeah, I found the 7000 editor and it appears to work pretty good. I also have the loader though technically I don't need one, it can use USB for data transfer.

Using the editor I was able to add a few more satellites, though with one weird quirk. The positions show west longitude, however if you edit one, it saves it as east longitude. Anytime I want to edit a satellite I must take the position and subtract it from 360, and input that in the box so that when it saves it still has the correct value.

I'm attaching the editor and also a Slingbox remote control "bin" file that enables most of the 7000/7100 functionality. (Slingbox, another thing to add to the "good stuff" part of my review). As I come across useful stuff for this unit I will add it here so others can benefit.