922 Dead Battery What Really Happens

[stoker_x1]

OK, I know from past reading on the subject "922 Dead Battery" that you lose the ID number of the receiver which is needed in order to buy programing.

My question is:

Besides lose of ID#, what else is lost? Hope someone has experienced this problem before. Do you loose all the current generic satellites updated from the stream?

If the generic sats are not lost after a dead battery, and you don't want programing on one of your 922 receivers, that might be a good thing.

If the receiver has lost it's ID# due to bad battery, can providers still write "Firm Ware" updates to your receiver from the stream?

Thank you in advance.

 

[stoker_x1]

I apologize if my question is not real clear.

Can providers or "The Stream" write FW to a 922 if it doesn't have an ID#, result of dead battery?

 

[stoker_x1]

OK. I learned from a private message that when the battery dies, you loose both the ID# and all the Digital channels from 100 and up.

That would be a bad thing On the other hand though, analog sat lists would still be intact.

Just for info purposes.

 

[Lil Chris]

Thanks for sharing what you learned. Can it still be used as a dish mover then?

 

[tvropro]

You can use it as a dish mover but you need to replace the battery. Otherwise you will loose all your stored positions if you take a power hit or unplug it.

 

[stoker_x1]

The receiver will retain all sats within it's stored list. It can move the dish and tune to each sat in the list, but you need to replace the battery as tvropro said. Other wise, you will have to re-enter setup each time as the receiver cannot hold your settings without battery.

 

[coinmaster32]

Motorola's design of the 4DTV makes no sense to me.

Why keep such a critical thing as the unit id in memory that will be wiped after a battery and power disconnect?

Why couldn't they of used memory that doesn't need a back up battery?

 

[tvropro]

Why keep such a critical thing as the unit id in memory that will be wiped after a battery and power disconnect?

Why couldn't they of used memory that doesn't need a back up battery?

They did this to discourage piracy since messing with the board would cause the unit to destroy itself.

This also was done for planned obsolescence.

 

[brex2001]

Motorola's design of the 4DTV makes no sense to me.

Why keep such a critical thing as the unit id in memory that will be wiped after a battery and power disconnect?

Why couldn't they of used memory that doesn't need a back up battery?

Because these IRDs were engineered to use the components available at the time, long before modern RAM chipsets. Even laptops & desktops still rely on a lithium battery for retaining other than default(ROM) BIOS settings.

 

[tvropro]

As far as I know even the newest DC-2 commercial receivers still use the battery for unit ID and other critical info. If the power gets disconnected it also looses critical seed keys that are used to decrypt. This goes back to the piracy thing. If a hacker tries to extract this info loaded into the main chip (and battery backed up) it will most likely destroy itself. This is probably why the DC is so secure.

The million dollar question is will the DC get hacked once the 4D goes away? Some very smart pissed off 4DTV users may be able to do it who knows? If that did happen it would probably cause Motorola to have to spend tall dollars to secure any holes especially if it spread to the commercial decoders. In a way I would get a kick out of it if Motorola got forced to spend big bucks to do it. As much as I don't condone piracy, they kinda deserve a slap for killing the 4D and not offering any final support so we can program our own maps and satellites.

 

[truckracer]

I agree- it would be quite comical for moto to have to rewrite code for digicipher.

 

[TheTechGuru]

DigiCiper III has a nice ring to it, lol.

So even if one replaced the battery post failure the unit still won't download maps and get ZK DCII channels?

 

[Anony55]

So even if one replaced the battery post failure the unit still won't download maps and get ZK DCII channels?

If the unit loses it's UID, it will still DL the maps, but won't get any DCII channels... including ZK & FP.

Cheers