Thread: GeoSatPro DSR200

Recently got to try out a GeosatPro DSR200 from out friends at SatelliteAV. There are 2 models of the receiver, the 200 which is the base unit and the 1100 which implements a DVR function. Opened the box to find the receiver, the remote and a manual that is very well put together. SatelliteAV put it together so there is no translation issue. The remote kind of caught me off guard as it eerily resembles a Captiveworks remote I had. It is very well laid out and has bigger buttons.

I am doing the review in 2 parts since the receiver caters to 2 groups. The folks who want it just for Glorystar setups and the hobbyist. First part is the Glorystar setups. I hooked up my cable and powered on the unit. It asks for your language and then you have 3 options depending on setup
-Glorystar setup (97 & 101W)
-Adventist setup (101W)
-Hobbyist setup (all sats)

Since I had my dish pointed to 101W I said Adventist. It asked me for my time zone and that was it. The receiver automatically loads the Glorystar approved channels into the unit and sets the correct time. That’s it. No loading channels you don’t want. No looking up frequencies and scanning. Set it up and that’s it. I then did a master reset which brought me back to the main setup. This time I selected “Glorystar” setup. Once again all the Glorystar approved channels were loaded into the receiver and the settings were also corrected to. It defaults to 22k on for 97W and 22k off for 101W. Since my setup is different I had to go into the menu and turn the 22k off for 97W which is rather easy to do. For the Glorystar and Adventist setups there are 4 default channels
Channel 1 has the Glorystar logo
Channel 2 is a message from Glorystar
Channel 3 shows the new channels added. This is a great feature for the Glorystar folks in my mind.
Channel 4 talks about finding an installer

The channels start at 100 and the radio channels are at 1000. There is no TV/radio option which is a good thing. Just go to channel 1000 and there is your radio channels.

One of the neat things is if there is a new software out there you don’t need to download it from the computer and load it into the receiver. You select OTA and it checks for new software. If there is new software out there you can download it directly from the satellite. I did update the receiver with the newest software and when it was done the receiver reboots. Said I had “Glorystar” setup and it downloaded the channel list again. Now the receiver does load a couple of the news channels on 97W but if you want more than that, you can go into the menus and rescan a transponder or the whole satellite. Just a note that if you reset the receiver and select Glorystar it will only load the Glorystar approved channels. You would need to rescan the other channels in.

The channel list is thought out very well. Press a button and you have a few options. You can sort by a-z, z-a, or free to air only channels. You also have an option of having a “short list” of the channel guide. Normally when you bring up the channel list it fills the whole screen, you can press a button that shows “simple list” which shows 10 channel list in the corner. There is an option in the Glorystar or Adventist setup that allows you to set up a favorite list to show only the channels that have the language you want. So if you are like me and don’t want any Spanish channels you can set up a favorite to show just the English channels. Other options are Spanish, Russian and Arabic.

Editing and deleting channels is a snap. You can rename channels, move them, or delete by channel, sat, or transponder. I like if you say “delete TP” it will delete all the channels on the TP. But lets say you want to keep one (a good example is Russia Today. Its on a TP with a bunch of Arabic channels) you change the setting to “delete CH” and undelete the channel. One button deletes all the channels you want deleted. If you don’t want to use the remote, the channel list is ChannelMaster compatible. There is a USB port on the front of the receiver for easy download and upload of the channel list.

All and all for someone who wants a Glorystar setup or Adventist setup, this receiver is truly plug and play (as long as the dish is aimed properly). It downloads the channel list and can automatically update the software. If you are looking for a Glorystar setup for a family member or friend and they are not the most technically advanced, I highly recommend getting them this receiver. It is very easy to set up and if they goof up or screw up the receiver, they can do a factory reset to reload everything back to default.

Now the fun began. The receiver is made for Glorystar folks but how will it work for the “hobbyist” who wants more than that? Did a Master reset and selected “Hobbyist” where I was brought to the main menu. I went to setup the satellites and it asked for a password. One good thing is you can turn this option off (to ask for a password every time you go into the setup. The satellite list is in order from east to west except for 97W. it’s the 1st one on the list. The settings and options are very easy to go through. No hidden menus to change settings. If you go to the transponder frequency you press one of the color coded buttons for easy access to the TP list. This is a great feature as most receivers I work with you have to exit out of the dish setup menu to get to the TP list. You can add, remove or edit TP’s rather easily. The receiver supports both Diseqc 1.0 & Diseqc 1.1 for the hobbyist who has a 8x1 or larger diseqc switch.

So I set up the receiver for a couple sats I have setup. The TP list is pretty current but I decided to do a blind scan. The blind scan has numerous options
Freq step can be set to 2,4,6,8,10. The lower the steps the more thorough it is but the slower the blind scan will take
Symbol rate can be set for under 4000, 4-8000, above 8000 or all. I leave it as all
Polarity…self explanatory
You can change the start and end frequency. It lists the frequencies by IF so it shows 950-2150. This is a minor drawback as a standard LNB only sees 950-1450 so you would have to change this to 1450 every time you scan a KU LNB. SatelliteAV is aware of this and has assured me they are working to change it so the default is 950-1450.



I blind scanned a few satellites with the settings at 6MHz and was very impressed at the thoroughness of the scan along with the speed. Now I’ll tell you this isn’t as fast as my Coolsat but it’s a lot more through. A blind scan on a normal satellite takes about 45 seconds to maybe a minute longer than a Cooslat but the Geosat picks up TP’s that the Coolsat misses. I tried the infamous KFTL on 72W which is at a 1666 symbol rate. Coolsat even on detail misses it. Geosat picked it up every time I blind scanned. It seems like the blind scan is like a bloodhound. It finds the feeds other receivers miss. It picked up KTEL on 79W with the s/r of 2170 no problem. I blind scanned 103W which has the funky skew. My motorized isn’t compensated for that so normally I grab 1 maybe 2 of the NBC feeds and the usual others like Pentagon. A scan on the Coolsat brought 2 TP’s, Geosat had 9. A few days later I used this to blind scan the C-Band arc for an update to thelist and was very impressed. It found channels that I had never seen before and apparently had been there for a while. The threshold of the meter is very low. Many channels that read low signal the other receivers will pixelate. I found a few channels that the quality meter was low but the Geosat played it just fine. I did notice one item when blind scanning (or any type of scanning for that matter). If the channel does not have a name the GeoSat seems to take a while to log the channel. I know the Coolsat takes about 5-10 seconds to log these type of channels. The GeoSat takes about 30 seconds. So when you scan in 125W it does take a while since most of the channels do not have a name. It logs them as Un-named 02, 03 etc. Even though the receiver does not do 4:2:2 or HD when you lock on a HD channel the receiver actually tries to play the channel. You get part of the channel to show up (just partial and it looks black and white and scrambled). The receiver will work with Dolby digital (AC-3) audio. Just hook up your audio decoder or Sonic Voom and you can hear the audio from PBS and other channels.

I hooked the receiver up to my motorized setup to see how well it works with a motor. I mean what good is a receiver if you cant motorize it? Well I am very happy that it works fine on both USALS and Diseqc 1.2. It is bang on even after numerous scans across the arc. You can even hook up switches for multiple LNB’s and still use the motor which is something not every receiver can say. The meter is a very nice one. IN the right hand side it shows the signal in blue and quality in green. What makes it different is it also shows a bar graph if the signal fluctuates. This is great if you are aiming a dish. There is a beeper on there so you know when you are locked on the signal. Don’t worry if you don’t want that you can turn the feature off. As noted above, the channel list options are very easy to work with if you want to move channels around, edit channel names and delete channels.
I did run into two issues and 2 quirks. The first is I had 99W C-Band scanned in and the receiver kept freezing up on various channels which required a hard reboot (switch off and on). There was no rhyme or reason as to why it was doing it as it was on various channels. I tried with a switch involved and no switch and kept getting issues. I finally did a master reset and that did fix some of it. I did talk with SatelliteAV and they were able to duplicate the issue and assured me they are working on fixing it. The second issue is once in a while the remote just stops working yet the receiver works fine. It seemed to do it after doing lots of blind scans or watching a channel for a very long time. I was watching a sporting event that went over 2+ hours and the remote did freeze up on that. SatelliteAv is aware of the known issue. They assured me that they are fixing it and would have a software update out within the next month.
The first quirk is when you blind scan a satellite for some reason it seems to default back to the 1st channel in the satellite list. So no matter which satellite I am on it goes back to channel 100 which for me is 72W. I did find a workaround. I hit “sat” which brings up the satellite list and select the sat I want (like 91W). Then it only puts those channels in the list. When I blind scan it will go back to the 1st channel on that satellite which in my case is the color bars. The second quirk is when you select blind scan there is no option to scan ALL or just FTA and when I scanned sometimes I got FTA only and sometimes I got ALL. When I scanned 97W it didn’t log any scrambled channels so I had to do a satellite scan as ALL but on 105W it logged the scrambled New York Net mux (part is scrambled, part isn’t) just fine.

Here is a list of the features directly from the SatelliteAV site
-Upgrade Software & Update Channel Database via Front Panel USB 2.0 Port
-Upgrade Software & Update Channel Database via Satellite OTA
-MPEG-II Digital & Fully DVB Compliant.
-C/KU band control for each antenna
-LNB Tone Switch 22KHz mode On/Off/Auto
-Multi-LNB controlled by DiSeqC 1.0, 1.1, 1.2
-Motor Control by DiSEqC 1.2 and USALS
-5,000 Channels Programmable
-Blind Scan with Upper / Lower Frequency Range Selection
-Universal Smart Card Reader Supporting IRDETO
-Picture In Graphic (PIG)
-Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for On Screen Channel Information
-10 Timer Events for Daily, Weekly, Once Channel Selection
-Multi-Language supported for Menu and OSD (English, Spanish, French)
-Zoom Function by 2x, 4x
-Parental Lock
-Closed Caption Support
-Glorystar Christian Karoke Lyric Support
-Dolby Digital Bitstream Out through S/PDIF
-CVBS Video & Audio Output via RCA
-Component Y/Pb/Pr Output via RCA
-S-Video Output
-7-Segment(4-digit) Type of Front Panel Display
-Glorystar Approved for OTA and EPG Features

Some of the reasons I love this receiver are the very thorough blind scan and the picture it puts out. As a feed hunter, I want to find all the feeds out there and not have a receiver that takes 10-15 minutes to scan a satellite. The picture through the component output is STUNNING! The S-Video/AV cables aren’t too bad either The freeze ups were a downside but assured they are working on it. It was just weird that the receiver would lock up on 99W but had no issues with KU. I blind scanned for about 2 hours and had no lockups on it. The fact that SatelliteAV/Geosat is working to fix the bugs makes it even better. I am very impressed with the GeoSat and now it has a home on the 2nd motorized setup I have.

Iceberg - thanks for a very informative review.

Brian and crew at SatelliteAV did fine by the Visionsat IV-200, and it sound like they've outdone themselves on this new box!
Kudos to the entire crew.

(Listening to all the rants 'n bitches by the members here, probably didn't hurt at all, either!) -

The GeoSat seems to be a cousin to the Visionsat in some ways. From what Brian said, the DVR receiver can record HD like the Visionsat (to play on a computer)

Thanks for the review, Ice

It has the exact same OSD as my Conaxsat Trio, except for the bar graph and start/end IF in blind scan.

Enjoy the Receiver

Catamount

Iceberg, thanks for the honest review!

I really appreciate when reviewers present the good and the ugly and allow us to address the problem! I am irritated when a junk product receives a favorable review just because the product is associated with a sponsor. This review confirms for me that we are associated with a great site! BTW... We confirm that the referenced issues are corrected, in beta and set for the next firmware release.

Note: The "return to the first channel after scanning (or power cycling)" is a result of our decision for the receiver to reference a specific channel (channel 1) to provide a satellite based time setting. This is to overcome the errors due to power line referenced timers and free running crystal based designs, which are no longer the norm in DVB design. The satellite and channel which is in the channel number one position will sync the receiver. This is unlike other receivers where the time setting will shift to the time reference included from each tuned transponder (originating from the uplinker) right or wrong. This feature keeps the time constant no matter what satellite or channel and makes timer recording much more reliable.

We look forward providing many more updates for the DVR/DSR units and are moving the lessons learned into the next generation of receivers.

great job Tony on the review thanks.
and a thank you SatelliteAV for a new box.
2009 was very depressing.
also having the box what looks like 98% ready to before selling it.
good luck

Originally Posted by SatelliteAV

I really appreciate when reviewers present the good and the ugly and allow us to address the problem! I am irritated when a junk product receives a favorable review just because the product is associated with a sponsor.

oh I agree. Seen too many reviews on other sites that talk up a product only to be disappointed in the results.

This review confirms for me that we are associated with a great site! BTW... We confirm that the referenced issues are corrected, in beta and set for the next firmware release.

ok cool.

Note: The "return to the first channel after scanning (or power cycling)" is a result of our decision for the receiver to reference a specific channel (channel 1) to provide a satellite based time setting. This is to overcome the errors due to power line referenced timers and free running crystal based designs, which are no longer the norm in DVB design. The satellite and channel which is in the channel number one position will sync the receiver. This is unlike other receivers where the time setting will shift to the time reference included from each tuned transponder (originating from the uplinker) right or wrong. This feature keeps the time constant no matter what satellite or channel and makes timer recording much more reliable.

ok good to know. I just do the "sat" button and find which satellite I want to stay on. It only shows the channels from the sat. This helps when blind scanning too (if I forget to remove the old info) and then have mix and match of feeds from various satellites in the list

one thing to note...stumbled upon this today

If you delete a TP, the channels go bye bye with it. Easy way to remove a bunch of feeds channels

edit: just found something new too...when moving channels you can move more than one. So if you want to organize your chanels on 97W by type
news
religious
other

select the channels you want to move and find in the list where you want to move them. press green button and they all move. This I like as on other receivers its one at a time to move chanenls.

Excellent study of the new receiver, answered all the questions I would ask.
Nice screenshots too.