? Huskervision blank???

[B.J.]

I went over to G28 today to look at the NET "Huskervision" channel. Transponder locked, but nothing there. Pulled it up in TSREADER using two different receivers, and it was basically all NULL BYTES, except for periodic &H47 sync bytes.
Basically just no content to the transponder at all. Strange. Seems like they usually have some sporting event over the weekends, and then switch to regular PBS programming when there aren't any sports things to show. Sort of like they just forgot to throw the switch or something.

 

[FaT Air]

I noticed that it was gone last week, was going to post, but thought It may only be me. Cause I also lost the RTV on AMC3, but factory defaulting, and reprogramming my 9200 got the RTV back, but no Huskervision. (???) Now to scan in all the other sats, something to do this week.

 

[B.J.]

I noticed that it was gone last week, was going to post, but thought It may only be me. Cause I also lost the RTV on AMC3, but factory defaulting, and reprogramming my 9200 got the RTV back, but no Huskervision. (???) Now to scan in all the other sats, something to do this week.

I just checked, and it's still just sending out &HFF bytes. Wierd.
I guess I just didn't notice that the channel was gone at first because I generally use AMC21 for PBS, and only use that for a backup, but I was having some weather related issues with AMC21 over the weekend, and tried to find NET, and noticed it was missing. My bud is in pretty bad shape, so at first I though I was just not receiving the signal, or that they had switched to the other 25319 SR, but then I noticed that I was getting a lock (on 4 different receivers), so I thought that maybe they had switched PIDs, so I brought it up in TSREADER, and saw that there just aren't any PIDs there, and all they were sending was "FF" and an occasional (I think about every 182 bytes) sending "47" sync bytes. If it weren't for the sync bytes, I would have still assumed that it was a receive problem on my part. But it seems to just simply be a case of no content on the signal. Their DCII signals on 3780 are still up, so I guess that must still be their main way of getting their signal around the state.
Anyway, I hope they bring that back. It was an interesting signal, in that when they had regular PBS signal on there instead of sports, the bitrate on the video was higher than the bitrates on AMC21, which I would have assumed was their source, so I was always curious about what difference if any seen when video is up-converted to a higher bitrate from a lower bitrate source. Or, perhaps they are getting their source from the IP streams instead of the video streams on AMC21.

 

[B.J.]

Looks like Huskervision is back, with regular PBS programming on it, although the channel is now ID'd as "HD Truck"
Yesterday, I decided to try to completely re-align my big dish, since the last time I tweaked it, I forgot to tighten down several bolts, and the wind moved it, so I had to relocate things after the alignment. When I came to G28, I tried Huskervision, and it was back.

I'm still curious about the bitrate of this channel. The video right now has a 37.82 Mbps bitrate. That's over twice what the same channel has on AMC21. I assume that they're just sending the AMC21 signal out over a higher bitrate channel, and the result won't have any better quality than the 18 Mbps source, but I guess it's possible that they're getting it from IP sources, and it really is better quality. I don't know enough about mpeg video to tell if it really is higher quality or not. I think this kind of demonstrates that bitrate may not always be the indicator of quality that we think it is.

 

[Tron]

They might be re-uplinking the 18 Mbps signal from AMC-21. Regardless of bitrate, actual picture quality will only be as good as the source. That said, the PBS-HD on AMC-21 looks very sharp.