Black Hole and Vu+ Uno 4KSE

[KF4YLM]

As it would happen, I finally took.delibery of another Enigma box just this month.

Exec summary of first impressions:
Vu+ Uno 4KSE is a sleek, flexible, fast box in terms of boot and manual scan. Learning curve on programming and western longitude operating idiosyncrasies is marginal for a an op with prior STB and embedded Ux appliance experience. Performance is ok.


I have been using the Linkbox 9000i Local for over a year as the main SRB. Reliable but limited.

A/B switched I/F also runs to the ham shack, where I parked the AzBox MiniMe American... That STB is flexible, but not reliable.

Hope was Vu+ would have something in between.

Quoting Wayne.from Letterkenny, "To be feh-ahhhww... ".... it's an Enigma2 box.

Getting it to scan was a bit of a trick. "Automatic" scan behaves like blind scan. There is a blind scan plug in that had me hung up for hours.

Factory image is Euro-centric... Expected that, and that's fine. In fact, for the user with a site to 19E and such, this appears to be plug-n-play with preloaded transponders and services. I added western birds with Dreamset, only with minor difficulty. Telnet method works better than http. Dreamset has no method of editing antenna set-up (i.e., DiSEqC or 22kHz tone swtiching, positioner schemes, LNB LO,.polarity switching schemes, etc.). This all.must be done on the STB.

Updated the image on the STB with little difficulty. Came with June 2018 image... Updated to on posted a week ago. Nice to see current development on the mfg part!!

Inspired by that success to try and see what Black Hole images were all about. So far, I am a fan! Global arc bird entries are nice. Speeds up setup.




Give me another week or so to let the newness of the thing wear off. May be able to offer some more interesting stories by then.

 

[Titanium]

The automatic scan function only scans preloaded transponders that are either downloaded from a file or manually entered. Automatic scan does not blindscan for new transponders.

To my knowledge, no blindscan function was ever available for this STB as the tuner code was not released. The uno 4kse was released in 2016. VU+ manufactured a newer 4k model in 2018 (zero 4k) that supported blind scan.

 

[KF4YLM]

Brian -- thanks for clearing that up. Realized that was what was going on as well after a few more rounds with the thing.

Oh -- and I'm happy to report that the Vu+ and ASC1 play nicely together!

I've seen the Zeros, but was intrigued by Uno's dual tuner. And I've seen threads elsewhere that bemoan the Zero's blind scan as not quite as good as a Dreambox or other SiLabs tuner or HW based blind scan.

Using DreamSet to diddle the transponder xml. I think I downloaded another program to try, but haven't had time to mess with it yet.

First time I've ever been able to catch UHD feeds; they still look neat even on a Samsung display that's stuck at 1080p.

One common quirk on this box -- LOTS of channel surfing between Radio/TV/Radio/TV (it seems) can sometime confuse the video adaptor into rendering a resolution mode my TV doesn't understand. I don' t know what res mode it gets stuck in. The remedy, however, is to use the on-box display to navigate the menus to restart. I may try to nav that way next time it does this to see if I can tell what it's doing.

Found some other strange behavior in Black Hole Not ready to call it a bug yet, because I'm still getting used to this image. It certainly behaves differently than the Vu+ factory image. Some Globecast TV channels scan in as radio, for instance, under Black Hole -- they scanned fine under the factory image.

I also downloaded OpenPLI and a few other images to play with.

The Vu+ Android application is nice, mostly. I've enjoyed being able to stream audio services from the dish via headphones while the wee ones sleep, while doing dishes at the sink or something. It works quite well when you select VLC as your player. Hiccups: 1.) The "default" in-app player -- on my old Moto 3rd Gen Android -- is glitchy, and shuts down when the screen goes to sleep. But VLC is smooth and runs despite the screen being locked. 2.) "Zapping" a channel under the stream selection doesn't necessarily "zap" it on the tuner. That's something else you have to manually select in the STB config. 3.) ... and this is the strange one ... the app will only start up properly if it can see the internet. At my house, the 802.11 network has no i-net connection (we live in an area which is severely under-served for broadband). So cell data has to be turned on briefly to start the app, then turned off so traffic is routed to the local 802.11 "non-internet" WLAN. For most people, won't be a problem.

This thing is pretty neat so far, but manually scanning everything is a step back from the Linkbox9K Local and the AzMiniMe.

VY 73 DE KF4YLM