Social Feed

No, it's not considered signal theft, but you'll only be able to recieve fixed key or FP mode digicipher II signals and not signals that are really encrypted. Technically FP signals are encrypted too and still have to go through the DCII decryption engine, but they're encrypted with a fixed key that's known to all DCII recievers that have been previously authorized and haven't had the autorization reset. There are some DCII recievers that don't even require having been previously authourized and know the key out of the box. Also, for DVB there's no such thing as FP, so you'll still only get unencrypted DVB signals. Anyway, don't be thinking this is somehow a "magic" reciever that will somehow get signals that really are encrypted as it won't.

Also keep in mind that this reciever only does DCII and regular old QPSK DVB. It'll not do 8psk DVB nor DVBS2. For that you'll need another expensive reciever. Another thing you need to check is what kind of outputs this reciever has. It may not have the kind you can just hook up to a TV set and watch. Some of these commercial recievers only have digital outputs that feed a digital data stream into other equipment, like video decoder boxes. Often times they'll either have ASI or LVDS. If it only has those kinds of outputs you'll need either a decoder box (which is also very expensive) or an ASI or LVDS input device in a computer running TSreader. ASI or LVDs PCI cards generally cost around $1k or more brand new. Rod Hewitt (the authour of TSreader) sells a low cost LVDS to usb 2.0 adapter for around $300. It's a real bargain compared to the alternatives and of course it's supported by Tsreader(which of course you'll also need a copy of). There are EVS boxes that'll convert between asi and lvds on ebay that sell for around $50. So for around $450 or so ($299 for the adapter, $99 for Tsreader, and $50 for the evs asi to LVDS box) you can feed the signal into your PC which can then either record it or play it back in realtime.

I personally preffer the DSR-4800/ digitran DTE-71xx series recievers as they are generally easier to tune and use. I'm not an DSR-44xx owner and have never used one but I suspect that tuning DCII signals on these receivers may not be as easy as the 4800. With the 4800 you can pretty much tune it like a DVB reciever, just entering the frequency, symbol rate, modulation mode,etc, and then flip through the virtual channels, but with other DCII recievers like this one, you may have to deal with channel maps which they tell me is a real pain. Of course I could be wrong about this as I've never used a 4402x. Also keep in mind that commercial receivers like this are not user friendly and are controlled by either manual programming through buttons on the front panel or through an rs232 or rs422 port by a PC running special software and they only tune to one service at any given time.

Anyway, good luck and happy bidding. I suspect you'll need to at least bid in the $500 to $700 range to stand any chance of winning, but again I could be wrong. I have in the past aquired 4800s for as little as $300, but that's generally the exception rather than the rule.

techno935 said:

There is this receiver on Ebay: http://cgi.ebay.com/Motorola-DSR-44...ameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem#ebayphotohosting

It claims to have been used to receive one of the NBC cable networks. If I buy this receiver and it was already once authorized to receive a master feed, is that considered signal theft? Just need to know about this to see if signal theft falls under this category.

Click to expand...

why would it be siganl theft? If its SUBSCRIBED (Authorized) its legit

As I said in my previous post it's not illegal. Even if you can, for some period of time, remain able to receive the service it was subscribed to. However, I suspect that the receiver will not remain able to receive the service it was subscribed to. If it was removed from service it was probably either replaced with another receiver, they stopped subscribing to the service, or the service they used it for switched to an alternative delivery system which probably requires different equipment. If it's either of the first 2 then the provider probably either switched their authorization to another receiver which has a different UA number or removed the authorization for this receiver. If they switched to a different delivey method, then it's moot point anyway, as the receiver will likely not be useful for the service anymore anyway. So, I doubt that you'll be able to continue to be able to receive any programming this receiver may have once have been subscribed to. You may however, remain able to recieve FP or fixed key signals as i mentioned earlier as this is generally the case for a previously authorized DCII receiver. Anyway, that's not illegal as it's how the DCII system is designed to work. If the provider really wants their signal encrypted they don't use fixed key.

I use the Digitrans 7150 (rebranded Motorola 4800) and it is great. I've heard the 4402x receivers will work well, but as Stefan said, they do not come cheap...