I've been tinkering with my FTA system for close to two weeks now, and I've realized that while the overall process of aligining my dish and motor for FTA reception has gone surprisingly well and relativey easy, the process of finding a way to efficiently manage my channels has proven to be the most time consuming and sometimes frustrating part of using my FTA system.
As I've mentioned in previous posts, what seems to be the biggest nuisance so far is the inability to assign names to manually entered transponders and make them stick. It turns out that if I manually enter a transponder in Channel Master or Pansat's software and assign a name to it, the name will only "stick" if that particular transponder is detected in a satellite scan and stored as a channel. Otherwise, if the manually entered TP was not detected in a scan, the name will have disappeared when I re-download the channel listing to Channel Master. I find that alone to be a nuisance, but what makes it even more difficult is when I go through a TP listing that has been generated after running a smart scan. When my Pansat 3500 runs a smart scan, it automatically adds any detected TPs to the particular satellite's TP listing, and it doesn't seem to erase the TP listing even if a channel is not detected in the second half of the smart scan process. That makes it very tricky to go through a TP listing following a smart scan and decide which TPs to keep and which ones to delete. I constantly find myself thinking..."Is that a TP I entered manually and want to keep?" (of course, there's no indication since my manually entered TP names don't remain intact) or "Is that just a carrier that was detected in a smart scan?". My goal is to keep my TP and channel listings nice and organized and to eliminate smart scanned channels & TPs that either are no longer active or in which I have no interest in keeping, but presently I'm having a difficult time doing this, as so far it's proven to be very difficult to differentiate TPs I've entered manually and those added to the TP list in a smart scan. That said, I'm curious if anyone has any tips or tricks for efficiently managing channel lists and maintaining a tidy and organized channel listing through Channel Master software.
Also, just thought I'd see if anyone has suggestions for an issue I've encountered with Channel Master. First, after I've gone through my listings and deleted unwanted channels, I'm left with a number of channel number gaps resulting from the deleted channels. Is there any way to have Channel Master automatically shift up all channels and eliminate empty channel number spaces? I found a feature that seems to fill empty channel slots, but I'm looking to just shift up all channel listings to fill the gaps.
As I've mentioned in previous posts, what seems to be the biggest nuisance so far is the inability to assign names to manually entered transponders and make them stick. It turns out that if I manually enter a transponder in Channel Master or Pansat's software and assign a name to it, the name will only "stick" if that particular transponder is detected in a satellite scan and stored as a channel. Otherwise, if the manually entered TP was not detected in a scan, the name will have disappeared when I re-download the channel listing to Channel Master. I find that alone to be a nuisance, but what makes it even more difficult is when I go through a TP listing that has been generated after running a smart scan. When my Pansat 3500 runs a smart scan, it automatically adds any detected TPs to the particular satellite's TP listing, and it doesn't seem to erase the TP listing even if a channel is not detected in the second half of the smart scan process. That makes it very tricky to go through a TP listing following a smart scan and decide which TPs to keep and which ones to delete. I constantly find myself thinking..."Is that a TP I entered manually and want to keep?" (of course, there's no indication since my manually entered TP names don't remain intact) or "Is that just a carrier that was detected in a smart scan?". My goal is to keep my TP and channel listings nice and organized and to eliminate smart scanned channels & TPs that either are no longer active or in which I have no interest in keeping, but presently I'm having a difficult time doing this, as so far it's proven to be very difficult to differentiate TPs I've entered manually and those added to the TP list in a smart scan. That said, I'm curious if anyone has any tips or tricks for efficiently managing channel lists and maintaining a tidy and organized channel listing through Channel Master software.
Also, just thought I'd see if anyone has suggestions for an issue I've encountered with Channel Master. First, after I've gone through my listings and deleted unwanted channels, I'm left with a number of channel number gaps resulting from the deleted channels. Is there any way to have Channel Master automatically shift up all channels and eliminate empty channel number spaces? I found a feature that seems to fill empty channel slots, but I'm looking to just shift up all channel listings to fill the gaps.
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