OTHER ICECRYPT S3750CHD Satellite Receiver

Rick's has a review out on it as he is selling it. Pretty positive overall.
 
The thing I dislike about Rick's site is that unlike this board, where there is a "What's Up There?" forum that's not indexed by search engines, he encourages everyone to post anything they find right out in the open. I don't know if he has actually been responsible for any feeds becoming encrypted, but to me it doesn't seem like a responsible way to run a forum. The funny thing is he'll censor posts for other reasons that he doesn't clearly define anywhere (I think just whatever offends his sensibilities) and you won't know you've crossed the line until your post disappears, but one of the types of posts he'll always remove is if you suggest that people should be more careful about what feeds they post out in the open. So, I personally would seek out another source for any receiver I was interested in, because I don't think he's doing our hobby any good by calling attention to feeds that should probably only be spoken of in hushed tones. That's just my opinion, FWIW.

That said, a receiver would have to be really good before I'd consider spending that kind of money, given all the less expensive alternatives available on Amazon and eBay (both the ones we are allowed to discuss here and the ones we aren't). I know some of those are made very cheaply and don't have AC3 support, and I'd avoid those, but even so that receiver seems a little bit overpriced considering that every receiver I've ever bought was rendered fully or partially obsolete after a few years, at least in the post-analog era. Sure, my old Pansat will probably still pick up DVB-S signals, but then DVB-S2 8PSK came along, now we are seeing 16APSK and 32APSK, and probably soon everyone will want 4K output. But then I'm not the target market, since I'm using a PVR backend system with tuner cards, so the only way I'd probably actually use a receiver is for blind scanning and checking signal quality/strength. The only way this type of receiver might interest me today would be if it could stream its tuner outputs to the network using SAT>IP, which would mean TVHeadEnd could use it as additional tuners, but so far I have not seen any indication it has any such capability. But even if I didn't have the backend system, I'd have to be truly impressed with a receiver before I'd spend a couple hundred on it given all the other available choices. The one thing it does have going for it is it appears to have dual DVB-S2 tuners, which means that in theory you could have a C-and a Ku-dish attached, or you could run both outputs of a dual output LNB into it and watch or record from two different muxes simultaneously, so that alone will probably help sell a few. But it won't receive 4:2:2 (though it may be able to record it, if so you'd just need to play it back on something else that can play 4:2:2), so that's a downside.
 
My Alien2 was almost as buggy as my A3 with Spark, and there's no blindscan for Enigma2 for that chipset, so I'll be avoiding the Icecrypt.
 
I really liked my A2 after the last firmware release. It was super stable then. It had all the Joe stuff stripped out of it and never had another problem after that. Having said that, I've moved on from Amiko. Still, in terms of NA support and supporting people who in turn support hobbyists, I wish Rick well.

One thing that was cool with the A2 was that it could share the PVR recordings as a SAMBA share over a network. Very handy, particularly for things like watching a 4:2:2 recording.
 
The new Icecrypt receiver has the same Linux kernel, U-boot, and Dbase versions as the Alien 2. It is shipping with software version 1.2.86.

When I saw the Icecrypt release announcement saying it supported 16APSK, I reconnected my Alien 2 to check it out. My Alien 2 has version v1.2.72 installed and it also receives the 16APSK channels in the 3980H mux on 97W. I've been watching channels in that mux.

I have firmware versions up to 1.2.83 for the Alien 2 but haven't see any reason to upgrade above 1.2.72.

Ernie
 
I really liked the A2 with the final firmware. I think that in the end it was the most reliable STB I've owned. I didn't think that with earlier firmware. I was pretty mad that I bought it days before the A3 was released and my initial complaints were met with - you should have waited a week and got an A3! The A2 and A3 made me realize that jamming too much functionality into a STB made for instability and quick obsolescence.
Ripping out the Spark portal and YouTube features fixed the crashing problems and made it rock solid. Good on Rick for bringing it back to North America.
 
From what Rick posted, the engineers told him the new Icecrypt receiver is an redesign of a previous model that was "similar" to the Alien 2. Some of the things added were the RF modulator and software that supported 16APSK.

As I've already said, my Alien 2 does (or rather DID) do 16APSK without any problem.

It may be "old" but it is a very good receiver with an excellent picture and Samba support for recording and playback. It's also easy to boot Enigma (which I haven't done in a long time) if you desire.
 
The new Icecrypt receiver has the same Linux kernel, U-boot, and Dbase versions as the Alien 2. It is shipping with software version 1.2.86.

When I saw the Icecrypt release announcement saying it supported 16APSK, I reconnected my Alien 2 to check it out. My Alien 2 has version v1.2.72 installed and it also receives the 16APSK channels in the 3980H mux on 97W. I've been watching channels in that mux.

I have firmware versions up to 1.2.83 for the Alien 2 but haven't see any reason to upgrade above 1.2.72.

Ernie
Can you give me some hints on how it scans the 16apsk channels, I have the same box and all the versions #s and it doesn't see them when scanning, thanks
 
Can you give me some hints on how it scans the 16apsk channels, I have the same box and all the versions #s and it doesn't see them when scanning, thanks
If you are looking for the MUX on 3980H on 97W, that MUX is gone now.
 
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I started a thread a while back about the Golden Media Triplex receiver which is very similar. At the time it was great a few years ago. However it is a bit dated imo. Many newer faster receivers can be had for less money. The later updates slowed my box down substantially.
 

OTHER Manhattan RC-1978

AMIKO A3

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