Coolsat 8000 HD receiver

SatinKzo said:

So now all that is missing is blind scan?

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jmorales22 said:

All these are relating to OTA

1) I'm missing two channels. When you're only watching OTA and you don't have cable, it's not like you can just forget about any channels. I've tried setting the step frequency to 0 and starting at 0mhz for my scan! (No, I'm not stupid and I can confirm the missing channels are there)

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2) This is a big one to me, and possibly irrelevant to other people: it doesn't have a zoom/stretch feature. One of the reasons I got this early on was because I need to be able to stretch 4:3 content on my new CRT HDTV (native 16:9). If I watch too much content with black bars, I'll get uneven fading and a very ugly look when I'm watching HD content. Setting the screen format to 16:9 does NOT change anything. It needs a 4:3 zoom mode, or at least the option to make the black bars gray. I'm very dissapointed that this thing can't do it.

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3) No EPG. That's not a must-have, but when you buy something you expect it to work as advertised right? Well when I push a button I expect to see what I'm watching appear in a little convenient box. I paid $430 for this thing, so I'm not just going to settle for what I get. It can't seem to get its local time from the broadcasters either, which I'm sure goes hand in hand with the same reason there's no epg.

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4) The channel #s are all out of order. In fact, they don't make any sense at all. Since there's no epg, if you don't rememember the call letters of the station you want, good luck figuring out what you're watching. I guess you can manually name the channels, but what a pain. The channel # reassignment also does not work.

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Maybe (hopefully) all these problems can and will be solved with future firmware upgrades. But right now the thing is far from perfect.

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jmorales22 said:

Thanks Iceberg for your help. Honestly I've tried step frequencies of 600, 1000, 1200... etc. I even went and found out the frequencies the channels should be on in mhz, and manual scanned through that area. I found that the signal was all over the place, going from 99% to 0 and back again. I never could find a lock on it. That's on the one missing UHF channel... haven't tried to manually lock on the missing VHF one although I have set the start frequency below 100000khz. I feel like you're lucky to have all your channels.

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As for the time thing... yes I can set it manually, but on my other atsc tuner, it wouldn't get program information unless you set it to get the time from the broadcast antennas. I assume it's the same here. that's the part that isn't working. But I feel I should mention it likes to reset the time once I set it manually anyway. Maybe it's missing a cmos battery, maybe it's low, or maybe they were just stupid enough to have it keep the time setting in volatile memory... I just don't know.

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I have given up trying to use my compass to point the darn dish, and figuring out where to mount it. So I'm getting some help. I'm looking forward to sharing my thoughts on the units performance if/when I can get pbs hd channel. I used to get the loop fed from the local pbs station and loved it. But they've since decided to multicast instead.

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SatinKzo said:

Iceberg, I haven't read the whole thread, but I skimmed it and didn't see anything with motor controls? Did you test them and if so, did it function properly?

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I decided to hook it up to the motor to see if the motor functions are working like they should. Took the 5000 and moved it to my true south of IA6 and reset the motor. Hooked up the 8000 and set up my satellites in order from 72-148. Set up IA6 and set my USALS. Dish didn’t move, which was good as I am at 93.0W. Set up G3 next door and the dish flawlessly moved to the sweet spot with no issues. The signal quality meter seems to be a little better than the 5000. The 5000 needs a 63 for threshold and maxes at 82-85. This one will lock on a signal with a 43 quality (I had a feed that was low quality but locked) and max is 99. When I was on AMC3, the numbers were everything from 99 on the really strong transponders and the PBS stuff was around 85.So the meter seems to be a little more lifelike than the 5000. Went through and set up all satellites with USALS. All of them except for the DBS were bang on. I have the DBS set up as an offset so of course it wouldn’t be right. I did work with Diseqc 1.2 but the weird thing is it doesn’t say East or West when you move. There’s just arrows so I didn’t know which way was which. Now that may sound goofy but the way my setup is, the motor is right outside where I am on the north side of the house facing up the roof. So if I hit right arrow, I would think the dish moves East. But if you have it set up different, right arrow might be west for you (depending on which way you are facing). Rest assured, right arrow means East and left arrow means West. I set up all the free channels on the satellites with no issues. When I set the auto scan, it will scan one satellite then move to the next and scan that but it won't start scanning until the motor stops. The neat feature with the 8000 and a motor is if you go through the channel list, the motor wont move until you hit “OK” (the 5000 starts moving as soon as you get to a channel on a different satellite). The receiver will work with a motor & diseqc but there is a trick. The only options are none, diseqc, motor (Diseqc 1.2) and USALS. You have to set up Diseqc first then go and select motor. I was using a 22k so this really isn’t an issue but I wondered how when I hooked the box back to the fixed dish it knew what diseqc to pick even though it said “motor”. Scrolled through to diseqc and it still said “4" from earlier.

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