blindscan impressions
i got home from a quick trip the yesterday to find the latest drivers which offer fast blindscan. i got to put in a good session with the software lastnight and i must say for a second release, the software is pretty good. i scanned all cband from 139w to 72w. there wasnt a sat it didnt scan in less than 3 minutes. 2 minutes was actually about the average time it took to complete a full scan (tps and channels). it even scanned satmex 6 in under 3minutes and its a fairly weak (this north) and pretty full satellite. it is a very accurate and thorough scanner.
the lowest sr i found was 1445 on amc 8 @ 3747v. i found a few tps with sr's in the range of 1600. the highest sr s2 signal i logged was 4120 on galaxy 12 @ 31248 (i think i may have scanned some over 32k but it was 4 in the morning). i also did notice a s2 16apsk signal on an anik bird i believe. it locked but didnt scan. im assuming its due to the fact that my 10 footer is pretty out of tune. well thats the good points. haha.
the bad.... i could hardly keep the dvbsoftware running. i figure the pcie2006 i have will only ever be a slave tuner, so i configured it as follows. first i ditched the tp data file. its in some silly .dat format and not easily editable with a short glance and notepad. there is also little to no way to edit sat info using the dvbworld software. once a sat name is assigned a degree there is no way it can be changed that i could find. there is also not a way to delete a whole sat. on a related topic and only slightly annoying is the fact that the sat locations are in 360 - X format. i find that although someone thinks it may be proper it is slower for me to find sats. it would be nice to see simple north / south and east / west check boxes for usals allowing north american degrees work(ive already built my sat list haha). anyways i blindscan created all sats i worked with and the scans were awesome. for some reason the software is very unstable when trying to tune and render a channel. if i was to try and tune a channel immediatly after a scan the software would lock then crash. upon restarting the software the last sats scanned before exiting the program were all lost. this called for scanning and then restarting to save the scans frequently. reminds me of my sat list issues with my azbox. haha. after i completing a large enuff set of scans i proceded to try and watch some tv. i could only seem to render about 30 percent of the channels i knew were there. the other 70 percent seemed to cause one of 2 different crashes. it did not seem to depend on codecs. i decided to try and view a few of the problem channels in mytheatre and they seemed to render fine. as a comparison... the pcie2006 zapped channels at a very slow rate compared to the prof tuners i have. on average channel zaps took about 3 seconds and most resulted in the software crashing.
so i guess to sum it up...
pros
the tuners scan fast and thorough and find low and high sr signals.
cons
scan results saved in a wackt .dat file. tp.ini files would be alot more useful.
software lacks a few needed config options. most notably the sat delete / edit functions.
video rendering was very unstable on my machine. im going to test a new install of windows on another machine to try and duplicate the behaviour.
all in all a very nice addition to my collection of gear. once i figured out the quirks i scanned alot of birds in a short amount of time. was i smiling. haha. keep in mind this is only my own findings.
crackt out,.