Thread: Prof 7301, 7500 and 8000 Tuners

STB6100

supports QPSK/8PSK/16APSK/32APSK modulations and low power
STV6110A


supports QPSK/8PSK. See Tuner Specs for details, and look through
STMicro


site for more info.

Originally Posted by zamar23

See
STB6100

supporting QPSK/8PSK/16APSK/32APSK modulations and low power
STV6110A


supporting QPSK/8PSK Tuner Specs for details, and look through
STMicro


site for more info.

I see so now with the
http://www.st.com/stonline/products/...e/bd/14947.pdf


(STV0903) and
http://www.st.com/stonline/products/...e/bd/11107.pdf


(STB0899) so the ultimate convination will be STB6100 with STB0899 right?

I'm waiting for the Prof Revolution prof8000 since it is PCIe but uses STB6100 + STV0903 so I'm waiting to see if is worth it.

Originally Posted by enb141

Iso the ultimate convination will be STB6100 with STB0899 right?

The STB0899 came out in 2004 I believe. The STV0903 has well superseded it.

So the new STV0903 is better and has all what STB0899 has?

DO you think the best solution right now is STMicro chips?

The best solution is probably a sat card that combines low cost, excellent stability and picture quality, fast channel switching and full channel lineup locking ability offered in your region. It only partially depends on chipsets used.

Had a few minutes to play with the Prof 7301 on Linux. This is on a custom, but fairly benign 2.6.28 kernel. Following zamar23's tips, I pulled Igor's latest patch and applied it to a recent snapshot of his. I then applied Andreas Regel's patches for the stv0903. All the hardware seemed to get recognized as tester239 posted, but my kernel panics as soon as I try to tune something.

Next I tried zamar23's ready to install tarball. That shows some differences in the logs when the drivers attach to the 7301, and I had no kernel panics when tuning. In fact I was able to record the full 3840 V 27690 transponder on 58W and all the streams show up fine in TSReader. The tuning status, signal level, CNR and BER are all hosed, however. I had little success in doing a simple transponder scan and when I tried to send DiSEqC commands, there was no positive indication they went out and nothing locked. However I didn't scope the data and didn't split my spectrum analyzer off the line.

I need to compare the two builds I did because Regel's changes look as though they need to be wedged in somehow. There may well be a long road to success as the drivers appear very immature at the moment.

Igor posts new patches to it almost daily. He is getting Prof 7301 card in a couple of weeks, and the driver is going to be officially released shortly after. Its just another driver in a long Linux drivers collection he released over the years. He would finish support for the USB card version as well long ago, if he had the USB card at hand. There may be something you're missing in terms of proper installation. Several testers posted good results with both versions, but they're not finished yet. Pls post your findings with kernel printouts in
this

thread, if you want to help finalize the driver. Or, you're welcome to offer your own version.

I moved over to Windows for more Prof tuner testing.

To address a common question coming up on forums, I am able to get Prof tuners of different types to run simultaneously on the same Windows machine, but not two of the same. I only tried DVB Dream, but this has always worked well for me with multiple tuners as long as I run separate instances. Thus one 7301 (PCI) and one 7500 (USB) work fine and completely independently, but two 7500s or two 7301s don't. In fact if I have two like tuners connected, Windows shows both devices in the Device Manager, but DVB Dream only lists one available BDA device.

Next I tried to address another question regarding the sensitivity of the Prof tuners relative to other units. I've taken a 'gentle criticism' that I may not be terribly useful in determining this because I normally have plenty of link margin. So I took my smallest Ku dish (a T90 toroid) with a crummy LNB and moved it slightly off 83 W as necessary to generate poor CNRs. The target was RTV and I came up with the following abilities for locking from best to worst:

Prof 7301/Prof 7500 (pretty much a tie)
DVB World 2104
TechnoTrend S2-3200
Pansat 9200HD

Even when all the other tuners had lost lock and were capturing nothing viewable, the Profs were still capturing perfect transport streams. While this is only one test, I was impressed. For those who like to read arbitrary SQ numbers, most of the time my Profs are running with SQs of 99-100%. By the time I got tired of dropping the CNR, I still had a perfect picture at an SQ of 20%. I have no calibration as to what this scale measures or means, and didn't spend much time dwelling on it.

Originally Posted by zamar23

Igor posts new patches to it almost daily. He is getting Prof 7301 card in a couple of weeks, and the driver is going to be officially released shortly after. Its just another driver in a long Linux drivers collection he released over the years. He would finish support for the USB card version as well long ago, if he had the USB card at hand. There may be something you're missing in terms of proper installation. Several testers posted good results with both versions, but they're not finished yet. Pls post your findings with kernel printouts in
this

thread, if you want to help finalize the driver. Or, you're welcome to offer your own version.

I am able to tune and receive streams on this card on Linux, so I doubt there is an installation issue. The driver is simply at an alpha stage and there is nothing wrong with that, and certainly no criticism on my part of Igor's efforts and contributions. To clarify a little more:

Your link is where I picked up Igor's latest patch from a couple of days ago. My first test wasn't completely fair as I tried to incorporate a number of fixes to the stv0903 driver that Igor does not have in his baseline. Some of these appear important for proper blind scan operation, but I did not review each one. My presumption is there is a collision between Igor's baseline, which is more focused on the 7301 and Andreas' which is directed at the TT-1600. Both tuners use the stv0903, and Andreas appears to be much farther along in exploiting this chip's capabilities. It will take more time than I have this weekend to untangle that mess, but I believe a synthesis of the two is the right path to pursue.

When I switched to Igor's pure baseline, I had no system stability issues and had some ability to tune and receive transport streams on my default dish (all DiSEqC positions at 1). But DiSEqC commands didn't seem to work and I couldn't run scan. I didn't start this project to participate in driver development, although if I find anything I'll be happy to send it to Igor. I'm going to put a little more time into this, but if it looks like a more robust driver is down the road, I may wait for that to happen. I've already earned my stripes in driver coding over the past 35+ years.