.....
What I understand is some IRD's and PC software can give the info back.
I don't have anything that will give me that info.
So I put a call out here to ask those that did have the various IRD's to check.
....
The Broadlogic card I use to find the FEC, is kind of neat to use. It has a control app, and when you tell it to tune a transponder, it has an indicator for "DATA LOCK" and "SIGNAL LOCK" (I'm not sure what the difference is, because both must be digital locks, because those boxes aren't checked if the signal is some other format, like DCII, even if the SR is correct.
But once both LOCKs are obtained, if you switch to a tuner status window, it has check boxes for all the different FEC values, and the control app seems to go through all these, until it finds the correct one, then it stays on that. If it's a good strong signal, this all happens so fast, I can hardly see it. After a pause, the two locks pop in, and by the time I get to the FEC window, it's got it figured out. However on weak signals, I've sometimes seen it cycle through the FEC values for 10 or 15 seconds before it settles down. All this AFTER it has locked on the signal, which is what I don't understand. Ie I didn't think it could lock if it didn't know the FEC value. Although I guess that it's possible that it was getting errors, and extracting incorrect values, but I don't think that is what is happening, because it allways goes through the values in order, until if finds one that works.
But even though I don't understand what I'm seeing, it's kind of interesting to watch, particularly on weak signals where it takes a while and you can watch it thinking.
The Broadlogic app also shows bit error rates, corrected and uncorrected errors, frequency offset and some other parameters. It's amazing to see the card tabulate 60,000 "corrected" errors, and yet have ZERO "uncorrected" errors.
If you can find them the Broadlogic cards (I think mine is a 1030) are so cheap (I think I paid something like $35) that it's kind of a good investment just to watch the APP, but I use mine to create slow scan spectra, which is really useful to me. A pretty useful card to have, if you have a computer with slots available. If you have a receiver that works with TSREADER (the broadlogic doesn't work very well with TSREADER), TSREADER can help you calculate FEC too. It has a "Mux Bitrate" parameter, and if you feed that and the SR into the FEC calculator someone gave the link to above, it will give you the FEC.
How all this stuff works is my main interest in this hobby. I can spend all day looking at data in TSREADER and the Broadlogic Control App, and never watch any actual video.
