Well, this has been "fun"....
First off, this tuner gets HOT. I mean, scary hot. It badly, badly needs a cooling fan in the most desperate way!
You could cook food on top of this thing.
I wonder if this is because of the dinky little power cord? I don't know.
I've had fits trying to get this thing to play nice with me. The clock, is a lost cause. It's 100% unreliable and utterly useless if you want to schedule recordings.
What ~I think~ on the clock is, I suspect that this tuner is designed from the ground up to be a pirate tuner and people normally use it to steal satellite from the pizza companies. I'll bet that while they are stealing satellite the pizza people send a signal that keep the tuner clock up and accurate.
So they didn't provide for legitimate use of this thing and the clock doesn't know how to operate in non pirate mode..
As for the dishes. I have a wire that goes from the tuner to the motor. Another wire comes out of the motor and I did have it run into a Cheita 4 way switch. Then the LNB on the motorized dish ran into port one of the switch and into port 2 I ran the wire from the 1.2m fixed dish.
I went through the satellite list and set all the satellites to USALS and discque 1.0 port 1 except for 123w which I set to no motor and discque 1.0 port 2.
This pretty much worked but the signal on 123 was very weak and would drop out a LOT.
I think I burned the switch out by taking the wires on and off when the tuner was on.
My bad...
So I dug around and I found an old 22k switch I bought a year or two ago. I didn't know at the time what I was doing and I bought the wrong kind and was never able to use it. I ended up having to buy and encoda 22k switch so this one went into the junk box.
So I took the 1x4 switch out and replaced it with the 22k switch. I put the lnb for the motorized dish on the 0k side and the fixed dish at 123w on the 22k side.
I went to the tuner menu and changed all the satellites to reflect this.
Bingo..... The weak signal problem was solved. ALL the satellites were coming in like 30% stronger now. That Cheita switch was trash from the word go.
Now I have a strange problem with the motor. It's very confused as to what's what once it most west of 97. It scans in all the ku satellites east of 97 and including 97, just fine. But towards the west, for instance, it thinks that it's on 119 but it scanned in 123.
After sitting here thinking about it, I suspect it's because of the fonky adapter I built. The metal plate hits the mount so I couldn't aim the dish up as high as it's supposed to go. So to compensate I tilted the motor up higher than I was supposed to. So now I'm thinking that it thinks I'm six degrees north of where I really am. Or something like that.
So tomorrow I'm going to take the dish down and apart and redo it somehow. I'm almost certain now that's why some stuff comes in and other stuff doesn't.
I think tomorrow I'll get further with it and get more stuff than I am now but I don't see any solution to the clock. Every time I change channels the clock goes goofy and when I shut the thing off it "boots" and resets the clock to Jan 1, 2010. THAT, is stupid.
The firmware, as best as I can make out since I don't have it plugged into my nice Vizio appears to read,
CSHS2-11-09-14:03F5CMT
Which means absolutely nothing at all to me.
I took a screen shot of it just in case I have one of the numbers or letters wrong and tried to upload it here but it gives me errors and won't let me upload anything..
Does anyone else have problems with this little thing overheating?
I really don't need another hot machine in my house. If it's getting hot it's bound to be using a lot of electricity as well. And the heat makes it more uncomfortable in here and makes the A/C run work harder. I'm wondering if it's defective or even hazardous. It really does get exceptionally hot.
So yeah, I guess it's cranky time for me.. I wish I could be happy and excited about this thing but it's falling short of my expectations..
Thanks..