Recent content by jpetersohn

Sinclair is one scummy organization alright. The HD cable fiasco killed any good will I had for them.

Careful with your terminology. 8PSK is a modulation scheme and is not related to the encoding system used for the video. 8PSK translates digital data (of any kind) into a radio wave. AFAIK all current DISH receivers use 8PSK. 8PSK -> 8 level phase shift key modulation 8VSB -> 8 level...

Yes, I would agree. They could swap the board as part of the refurb process.

The 942 drives the TV2 coax with a lot of signal strength. I had a leaflet in my box instructing me to install a supplied attenuator in the line for single TV. The attenuator is not needed for splitter.

Yes, the TV2 UHF modulator provides stereo. The 322 modulator does not.

The Broadcom 7038 does not feature an onboard ATA interface. I suspect this was done for pin count reasons. SATA requires a lot fewer pins than ATA.

Not necessarily. The daughtercard for a 7411 wouldn't need to be all that big. I really would like to see a complete picture (without hidden sections) of the 942 system board. I don't know the internals of the 921, but I would venture a guess that the daughter cards held the analog portions...

The secret may lurk beneath the power supply board. :D

Thanks! I have lots of answers for you now: The 942: Uses the Broadcom 7038 Dual HD video-on-a-chip system. This consists of the 7038 processor which contains the CPU (300 MHz MIPS R5000 core), a DRAM controller, two MPEG2 video stream decoders, DVB smart card authentication system, audio...

I haven't opened mine either (it's leased, so I'm not going to). If some intrepid soul would post high resolution photos of the circuit board I could probably learn more. The ASICs are usually SMTs of SOIC, PLCC, TSSOP or QLFC type. Edit: PLCC is actually a socket type. BGA is what I meant.

The stream has to be demultiplexed. It isn't going to write the entire TP worth of data to the disk. The decryption is probably part of the decoder stage (i.e. yes, the data would be stored encrypted on the disk).

After yakking with my colleagues and checking on the internet, I found some interesting info. There is a lot of MPEG4 IP available, some even as direct loadable VHDL for Xilinx and others. BTW, the tuner card doesn't have to change, assuming the transport multiplexing hasn't changed (and I...

I have 121 on port 3 of the DPP44 and neither the 322 nor the 942 have any issue with it.

When Dish installed my 942 yesterday the installer replaced the DP34 with a DPP44 with no questions asked. The guy did a great job. ;)

Huh? The bandwidth into the decoder is actually lower with MPEG4, the bandwidth out of the decoder is set by the video format (1920x1080i, 60 fps or whatever). What do you base your statements on? Assuming that the decoding is done by decoder ASIC, the rest of the hardware doesn't care.