Prof 7301, 7500 and 8000 Tuners
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The driver code I am working on is currently not directed at casual/operational use. For the moment, the best place to start is at:
s2-liplianin: Summary
There are still bugs, but this baseline appears reasonably functional. Caveat: I find most of the Linux app-side code rather pathetic and have been using home-grown utilities for my testing. YMMV.
I just wanted to report that I was able to get the first vestiges of blindscanning to work on my 7301 card. It went through the H polarization on Intel 9 (58W) and correctly found all the high rate transponders, including both S and S2. This was more of a functional test to see if there was any hope, so I short-circuited a lot of the code. I believe this is the reason why the low SRs were missed.
While this is all very encouraging, I can't promise anything soon. One of the major stumbling blocks is the rather poorly conceived S2API over which the Linux boys and girls are still patting themselves on the back. I haven't decided whether to hack this further to death, or develop a separate, more appropriate path for doing blindscanning. I could get things to work within the existing framework, but it would be less than optimal in speed and in accuracy. I've always loved the Linux philosophy of code first and (maybe) think later. There's always time to do it over, but never time to do it right. At least the hardware seems to be doing the job.
Edit: made some minor fixes and now it is getting all the SRs, low to high. This doesn't solve the S2API issue, and I'm certain I could increase the sensitivity for low CNRs, but I'm calling it a night.
While this is all very encouraging, I can't promise anything soon. One of the major stumbling blocks is the rather poorly conceived S2API over which the Linux boys and girls are still patting themselves on the back. I haven't decided whether to hack this further to death, or develop a separate, more appropriate path for doing blindscanning. I could get things to work within the existing framework, but it would be less than optimal in speed and in accuracy. I've always loved the Linux philosophy of code first and (maybe) think later. There's always time to do it over, but never time to do it right. At least the hardware seems to be doing the job.
Edit: made some minor fixes and now it is getting all the SRs, low to high. This doesn't solve the S2API issue, and I'm certain I could increase the sensitivity for low CNRs, but I'm calling it a night.
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If there's no support for blind-scanning in the standard, I vote for ignoring the standard. It's not like there are any other blind-scanning tuners available!
Latest DVB Word tuner models are blindscan capable ( I should say "blindscan ready") with proper driver support. Some Skystar earlier tuner models were reported to have blindscan support on this forum. Of course, any standard is supposed to be a living and breezing, developing creature, as many are. 
Interesting progress, and will hopefully materialize in a working solution.
Interesting progress, and will hopefully materialize in a working solution.
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Some quick updates:
I now have both the Prof 7301 (PCI) and 7500 (USB) blindscanning. I've been mostly busy working on fixes in the driver that are unrelated to blindscanning, and I have a ways to go on that side. At the moment the code finds and correctly measures just about anything in DVB-S and DVB-S2 flavors I've tried. The driver indicates it can also do DSS, but I haven't tested that. It can miss an occasional low SR signal in the presence of others. I haven't spent any time on this, but I have some ideas.
I now have both the Prof 7301 (PCI) and 7500 (USB) blindscanning. I've been mostly busy working on fixes in the driver that are unrelated to blindscanning, and I have a ways to go on that side. At the moment the code finds and correctly measures just about anything in DVB-S and DVB-S2 flavors I've tried. The driver indicates it can also do DSS, but I haven't tested that. It can miss an occasional low SR signal in the presence of others. I haven't spent any time on this, but I have some ideas.
Is there any particular reason that the company hasn't come up with blindscanning for Windows? I have nothing against Linux, but it seems strange that they wouldn't take advantage of all of the capabilities of their product.
There are PC tuner companies that supply their own tuner applications for Windows. For the most part these applications are next to useless and one quickly finds better free and commercial choices. Then there are companies like Prof that sell their cards with only drivers. At least Prof has guides that show how to install the apps and configure them. If this helps keeps the cost of the cards down, I'm all for it.
At the moment there are no blindscanning apps for Windows that I am aware of. This may change with the availability of PC tuners like Prof makes, and others that people have pointed out on these forums. One problem that could make this difficult is the existing BDA interface that Microsoft defined isn't even capable of doing DiSEqC, and probably much less blindscanning. Already each vendor comes up with their own hack to get DiSEqC to work, and this makes it difficult to get multiple PC tuner apps to work across different cards. I can very well see the lack of such standardization blocking the creation of blindscanning technologies on Windows. It will likely require a company to create their own app and hacks for their drivers.
The situation is pretty much the same on Linux, with the only difference is one can jump in and rewrite the code as one desires.
Is there any matrix that compare the DVB World, Techno-trend, Prof cards for features, price etc? I also plan on running one of these S2 cards on Linux as the Skywalker-1 I have does not support S2 but I am not sure which would be a better choice.
Hi Pendragon, first thanks for your work, i'm very glad to see someone interested in blindscannig with PCI Cards and I really hope that a windows blindscaning application be availale soon . A small correction there is a 2 blindscaning application for windows, but it's just for the Skystar2 (Ver 2.3) I currently own one and works perfectly and thats why I'm interested in your appplication because there is no DVB-S2 PCI blindscan as far as I know
Happy new year to everyone from South America
PS: There could be a few gramatical mistakes, english it's not my mother language
Happy new year to everyone from South America
PS: There could be a few gramatical mistakes, english it's not my mother language
i can only say thank you for doing what i would have tried to. it seems that most manu's dont want a blind scan feature to exist. if your into conspiracies, think of a 32 dish rig blindscanning 24 / 7 and reporting to the internet. it makes provider sneaks impossible. i am almost in possession of the gear to take advantage of your code i have salvaged many dishes and in turn i want to develop linux code to report our findings to the mass. itd be a cool project. i could help with the driver code but you seem to have it under control with baseline progress daily. when your blind scan or someone elses goes public i think many of our feeds will encrypt. but its the nature of what we do. keep up the great work. if you dont some other linux nut will.
crackt out,.
That would be great to activate DSS support, literally adding Twinhan 1020A clear DSS reception capabilities to this tuner line. :up
Some of the DSS support was already turned on in the STV0903 driver, and I've fixed a few minor oversights. Presumably it will work but I doubt I'll put any effort into testing DSS. Others can report back, however.
Since many reported in Twinhan 1020A devoted forum threads that unencrypted music channels are plentiful in DSS, sure some people might be interested to test it and report back their results.
Since many reported in Twinhan 1020A devoted forum threads that unencrypted music channels are plentiful in DSS, sure some people might be interested to test it and report back their results.
You would have to know me better to understand this is exactly the reason I won't be testing DSS
But I'll try to fix anything that's broken.New subject. Since we're talking about this in the 'kitchen-sink gizmo' thread, I'm attaching some shots of Intelsat 9 (58W) C-band vertical polarization spectrum swept by the Prof 7301 card from my 1.8m with a few lines of driver hacks compared to my bench SA. I wouldn't want to live without the latter, but the former will do a lot of what people need. Both the SA and BLSA provide additional frequency resolution. The 7301 vertical scale isn't calibrated, because I'm still working on that. The scan took about 12 seconds on the 7301. That was just a gut setting I made for testing. It might work as well faster, or might do better if slower. I haven't done any comparisons, yet.
Attachments
I'm not sure what you mean regarding DSS clear channels. Many people argued that if a provider does not encrypt a set of channels, they don't intend to limit the audience capable to watch and listen to these channels. Who can possible tell for sure, what a broadcaster's intent was in transmitting channels in clear? Advertising own services..., indifference, compliance with a sponsor or law requirement..., common good..., second guessing? Does any law prohibit receiving sat channels transmitted in clear - which one?
I also noted, you're making good progress with blind scan support as well. As to the progress with BLSA, its really coming great! To broaden the audience of people, possibly interested in using such driver's feature, can anyone suggest a simplified Manual or Guide explaining what BLSA is, what it's usually used for, and how exactly to read and interpret the scan results picture? In other words, any publication that would explain what a BLSA or Spectrum Analyzer shows on screen, what the difference btw these devices, and how acquired by BLSA data, when correctly interpreted, can be used to improve signal reception or sat system design?
I also noted, you're making good progress with blind scan support as well. As to the progress with BLSA, its really coming great! To broaden the audience of people, possibly interested in using such driver's feature, can anyone suggest a simplified Manual or Guide explaining what BLSA is, what it's usually used for, and how exactly to read and interpret the scan results picture? In other words, any publication that would explain what a BLSA or Spectrum Analyzer shows on screen, what the difference btw these devices, and how acquired by BLSA data, when correctly interpreted, can be used to improve signal reception or sat system design?
Sorry to send you on a wild goose chase. I simply don't enjoy listening to music via lossy compressed audio. CDs are bad enough. I'm proud to be arrogant
Hi pendragon Thanks for all the reports so far, I look forward to further updates and some code to play with in the future.
I have ordered 2 7301's and a single 7500 for playing with.
Could you tell me which driver you ended up using the stv0900_core.c or the stv090x.c version. Or I guess a combination of both.
The stv090x.c is easier to read and looks easier to modify/use for blind scanning.
The repository at v4l-dvb: Summary has a number of recent changes to the stv090x.c driver.
I also assume you have seen Roberto Ragusa's proof of concept Linux blind scan application for the skystar 2.3p [linux-dvb] [RFC][ANNOUNCE] blindscan 0.2 and related patch The code is very raw, but proved it could be done.
Thanks
I have ordered 2 7301's and a single 7500 for playing with.
Could you tell me which driver you ended up using the stv0900_core.c or the stv090x.c version. Or I guess a combination of both.
The stv090x.c is easier to read and looks easier to modify/use for blind scanning.
The repository at v4l-dvb: Summary has a number of recent changes to the stv090x.c driver.
I also assume you have seen Roberto Ragusa's proof of concept Linux blind scan application for the skystar 2.3p [linux-dvb] [RFC][ANNOUNCE] blindscan 0.2 and related patch The code is very raw, but proved it could be done.
Thanks
There are two separate camps developing drivers for the stv0903. One is the stv090x* version, which has been focused on the TT S2-1600 instantiation, while the stv0900* version is focused on other units like Prof. In many ways 090x appeared to be farther along a while back, but there are political reasons that make 0900* arguably a better starting point and that is what I am working from.
Regardless, both camps have a lot of code in common. They both likely derived from a vendor baseline and may be looking over each other's shoulders. They both have many of the same bugs. Be aware though that the Linux connotation of 'blindscanning' is not in the same vernacular as for FTA. Drivers often take this to mean that when tuning to a particular signal, they set up the tuner to the provided parameters and let it lock. In FTA, frequencies can be quite far off because of LNB accuracies and instabilities, and the Linux 'blindscanning' path allows this and the SR to be fine locked to what the tuner is actually seeing.
Both drivers for this demod take advantage of the fact that this chip can also find the modulation type, FEC, etc. on its own, and does not require the application to provide them. In fact if it does, they are ignored. All I'm saying is take the 'blindscanning' references with a grain of salt. There is only a cursory relationship to what we consider that to be in FTA, and there is no indication this was implemented in order to support a 'true' FTA blindscanning capability. However it was a great place to start and without it I might still be a ways from getting the feature to work.
I had been unaware of this until another soul pointed it out to me very recently. Unfortunately there is nothing here of any real value. For the moment, PC tuner blindscanning tightly couples hardware, driver and application. It's not clear the hardware has progressed to the point where one can abstract out the chip specifics from the high-level function.
I want to clarify for the forum moderators and visitors.
We refused to zamar23 in the exclusive distribution of products PTG in the United States and Canada. The reasons are not important for this technical forum.
It is important that, evidently, zamar23 offended. And I now see that he wrote a lot of negative and misleading information about our products Prof, our STM chips, etc.
Thank you Pendragon for the fact that you calmly accept attacks zamar23. Thank you for what you're trying to explain technical things to people who do not understand how DVB-S/S2 cards work.
P.S.
I have already decided that I will not deal with nonsense. I will not enter into a discussion on meaningless issues. I will not try to destroy the myths and fantastic tales about our and competing products.
P.P.S.
Pendragon also thank you for the work on a review of Prof-7301. I think that the review could be discussed at this forum.
We refused to zamar23 in the exclusive distribution of products PTG in the United States and Canada. The reasons are not important for this technical forum.
It is important that, evidently, zamar23 offended. And I now see that he wrote a lot of negative and misleading information about our products Prof, our STM chips, etc.
Thank you Pendragon for the fact that you calmly accept attacks zamar23. Thank you for what you're trying to explain technical things to people who do not understand how DVB-S/S2 cards work.
P.S.
I have already decided that I will not deal with nonsense. I will not enter into a discussion on meaningless issues. I will not try to destroy the myths and fantastic tales about our and competing products.
P.P.S.
Pendragon also thank you for the work on a review of Prof-7301. I think that the review could be discussed at this forum.
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