942 Mad Scientist First Look! 942 Innards.

[HokieEngineer]

Anything interesting under the power supply board?

Also, what is the chip to the right of the 7038, in between the 7038 and the 4500s.

[BrettTRay]

Thanks Goalie for the info. That was some great reading!!!

[HokieEngineer]

Just FYI, the bcm4500 doesn't actually care what the video format is. Its job is to pass the transport stream to the main cpu for decoding. The bcm4500 works just fine with h.264

However, as I said earlier, the 7038 does not decode h.264. The strange thing is, the 411 contains the 7038 + 7411, which can decode TWO streams at once. All they'd have to do is put a second tuner in the 411 and it'd be a dual tuner.

[Stargazer]

I had always thought that if you took the receiver apart that the warranty was void, even if it was the screws that takes the casing off. If the warranty would not be void then one could take the ribbon cable going to the hard drive and put a splitter on it or connect another hard drive to it or something and leave the one that is in the receiver in place.

Perhaps when the 942+ comes out someone should open one of those up and compare that with the current 942.

[HokieEngineer]

I had always thought that if you took the receiver apart that the warranty was void, even if it was the screws that takes the casing off. If the warranty would not be void then one could take the ribbon cable going to the hard drive and put a splitter on it or connect another hard drive to it or something and leave the one that is in the receiver in place.
Perhaps when the 942+ comes out someone should open one of those up and compare that with the current 942.

For some reason Dish hasn't used the little tamper evident pieces of tape on their receivers, other than on the harddrive. There really is no way for them to tell you opened it up.

[stone phillips420]

i open every box i own and if theres a problem dish always takes it back

[Smith, P.]

Anything interesting under the power supply board?
Also, what is the chip to the right of the 7038, in between the 7038 and the 4500s.

Should be 8VSB BCM3xxx; the PCB common view remind me DP522 - perhaps same team built it.

[K9SAT]

I Have to make a correction that earlier I reported it was the 8vsb module that was on its own its in fact the remote antenna module.

I found it incredibly easy to get around the hard drive sticker with out destroying it or making it looked tampered with. Upon lifting the 942's hard drive out of the casing.. I found, WHAH a fan!!! facing down.. Vary bad place to put it as that fan is easily blocked by the cabinetry that you put the 942 on. There is only a 2 CM spacing or so of cooling air between the (legs) of the 942 and the fan. Next I took a picture of the chip that was requested by HOKIE.. This chip is the Broadcom bcm3520. More on to this chip....

BCM3520
ATSC/VSB/NTSC Digital Cable Ready DTV Receiver

The BCM3520 is a Plug-and-Play DTV receiver with superior performance and integration capabilities for the cost-effective delivery of digital television programming to consumers.

The chip contains a digital receiver compatible with North American digital cable and digital terrestrial broadcast television standards. The receiver's unique system architecture can reliably receive, track and demodulate signals in the presence of interference and a wide range of varying multi-path channel conditions with the presence of noise.

The chip also contains an IF demodulator compatible with the NTSC video standard, and an on-chip audio decoder compatible with BTSC audio standard.


Source

The Hard Drive the 942 Uses is a western Digital 2500

250 GB, 7200 RPM, 8 MB Cache
WD2500SD

Designed and built to enterprise standards, WD Caviar RE SATA drives provide exceptional reliability and performance in 24/7 environments.

More info on this drive can be found
HERE

at western digitals sight. Also as per request I did take out the power supply and take pictures under neath.. enjoy

[BrettTRay]

What 8vsb module does the 811 have. I took my 811 apart but never seen a part number on it. I think it sayed who the maker was but no part number.

[K9SAT]

so the question that comes about now is how is the 942 going to do.... MPEG 4