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That will get you responses like "Which is the best car?" I think. Depends on what you want in a receiver. Are you looking for best picture quality, fastest blind-scanning or most accurate blind-scanning, most reliable hardware inside, or what. Most of us have to test out several before settling on a day-to-day use receiver, and then usually its a compromise. There's almost always bugs in the firmware, so you want to find a brand that has good support for its products, which might be tough since none of them that I know about are made in the US any more. Other than the one you mentioned, there's not many of them that have domestic customers in mind, fta is several years ahead of the US in use and popularity. Read all you can about the brands that interest you, and post questions about specific models. There's usually a member here who has tried one of just about any available brands. We're always looking to improve the hobby, and the hardware is constantly evolving.
Welcome to the forum!

I will tell you a brand to absolutely not waste your money on, AZBox. I should have took the hints not to get an AZBox, but I went ahead and tried one. All that AZBox Canada will do is promise an update in anywhere from a few weeks to a few days to fix the problems, and said update never arrives. Get the microHD it is great, with EXCELLENT support.

Thanks

HI and thanks for your reply....

This is absolutly ridiculous....

I can't imagine that no one can do a perfect product in this kind of market.....
This box is not hard to manufacture , not complex.....
My old vhs was much more sophisticated...!!!1

I think i will have a look to the microhd, seem to be a good choice for now.
Hope

Thanks!

First of all, there never has been nor will there ever be any "perfect" FTA product. What's perfect to you may not be considered perfect by someone else. Having said that, there are some models of FTA receivers that are considered to be better than others.

While the Micro HD "seems" to be considered a good receiver by most even it is not without problems. Search here and you'll see what I mean as there's multiple threads here where bugs have been found in that STB. The main advantage for the Micro is the fact that it's creator, Satellite AV is an ACTIVE member here and is usually on top of these type of issues.

As far as the AZBox goes, I have two of the earlier models, an Elite and an Ultra and had I of known then what I know now I would have NEVER spent any money on either of them. Not that they aren't reasonably good hardware mind you but the outfit that created them sold the brand name and they are no longer involved in the business. The last official AZBox released firmware update was back something like a couple of years ago and without constant updates, some of the features of that box are useless. That and even known bugs from as far back as the first Premium and Elite receivers NEVER WERE FIXED! Firmware updates for these receivers isn't something I would expect an authorized distributor to be doing. That task would be the responsibility of the people that actually produce them IMHO as I don't know of many people that can write Linux code.

Ennywho, when/if you finally run up on that "perfect" FTA box, lemmie know!

Its true, for me a perfect box would have to be open source, but to others they couldnt care less if it was open source or not.

I used to use dreambox's for years as the GUI is open source, it worked out really well for me and was able to add a few features here and there. But the drivers for the tuner/demod were closed source and I kept hitting a wall when I tried to add new features. Now I use a Linux box with PC tuners and love it. Many people wouldnt consider Linux w/PC tuners a perfect box, but to me it is.

I have blindscan (smart and long), spectrum scan, iq plot, dvb parsing, 4:2:0/4:2:2, H.264, ATSC, DVBS, DVB-S2 qpsk, 8psk, 16psk, 32psk, acm/vcm, turbo-fec 8psk/qpsk, Digicipher II, and working on adding DSS (kinda already do if I use wine/tsreader), I can view locally or stream via tcp to another box. There is very little up there I cant watch/find.

UDL