Nimiq 5 Launch Scheduled for September 18

Ditto

IF you have any timers set to the 72.7 sat before yesterday , check again because they won't fire. I had to delete them and recreate them since the 8psk transition was completed last night. I had to do this before when we switched from Echostar 6 to Nimiq 5 sat a couple of weeks ago.

What digiblur said. None of the timers changed or were skipped in this change over.
 
MikeD-CO5: thanks for the heads up, I'll re-set mine just in case. And make sure they're all there.

That off-air thing is bothersome, since it's hard to set a timer for an "off-air" channel...

Regards,
Fitzie
 
That's weird... I could maybe see it on channel moves, but I haven't had that issue at when channels have moved for me.

You definitely shouldn't have had it happen when Nimiq5 was brought online. Nothing in the tables changed at all for that move, just a different "bent pipe" up in space. If you had to recreate them for that switch you might have something wrong with your box.



Yep, they do that when moves are scheduled at night.


We record old episodes of MATCH GAME on the GAME Show network on channel 116 on the 72.7 sat using my 722k receiver. When it moved from Echostar 6 and on to Nimiq 5 , we got Off the air on that channel in the guide and the show did not record that day . It is set to record at 8:00, 8:30 & again at 12:00pm. The next day I checked the timer and NO shows were set to record. I deleted it and reset it and it worked fine till the change over to 8psk from Qspk or what ever it was called.Once again this channel as well as many others said OFF the air in the guide and nothing was set to record. I know because today at 8:45 am there was no recording and the show was on. So I deleted and reset the timer and it picked up the 12:00pm show. It is also showing recordings for the rest of the week and Saturday, Sunday and into next week.

Also ALL of my kid's timers on 72.7 showed nothing to record for his 10 timers that are on 72.7 using a 211k (with external hard drive/dvr support). Not on 61.5 though. Any timers for the hd channels are still set to record and have recorded. I had to delete and reset his timers too. Pain in the butt.

So don't believe me, but I do notice these things and document them. That is why I have detailed sat readings recorded for all eastern arc, and western arc in my notebook. The main thing is there is not that many shows that I record off of 72.7 sat since I watch mostly hd shows and local channels off of 61.5 sat or 110 sat on my side sat dish . But just in case you want to make sure check you timers off of 72.7 and see if any thing is set to record in the next week. If not , go ahead and delete and recreate the timer.
 
MikeD-CO5: thanks for the heads up, I'll re-set mine just in case. And make sure they're all there.

That off-air thing is bothersome, since it's hard to set a timer for an "off-air" channel...

Regards,
Fitzie


You are welcome. This is rare event but I have noticed when a new sat changes or they change to a different transponder compression like the 8psk transition , this happens sometimes. But if you re run a check switch you will have guide data again for the full 8 -9 days.
 
Here's some info I just collected. Each row shows the transponder number on Nimiq 5 and the bitrate of the null PID.

1 - 4.0 Mbps
3 - 39.7 Mbps
5 - 11.7 Mbps
7 - 1.7 Mbps
9 - 2.4 Mbps
11 - 12.3 Mbps
13 - 0.7 Mbps (8 HD channels)
15 - 11.7 Mbps
17 - 1.2 Mbps (8 HD channels)
19 - 12.2 Mbps
21 - 13.1 Mbps
23 - 11.9 Mbps
25 - 12.2 Mbps
27 - 0.5 Mbps (9 HD channels, one often but not always fixed to using 1.0 Mbps)
29 - 11.7 Mbps
31 - 12.4 Mbps

159.4 Mbps of unused capacity, yet at least 8 HD channels per transponder? For reference, it was 4-5 HD per transponder when they were 30 Mbit QPSK muxes, so about 5-7 HD per transponder would be expected for similar bitrates in 40 Mbit 8PSK muxes. We already know Dish has been cramming up to 8 HD channels on 8PSK transponders on other satellites already, but when you have almost 160 Mbps to spare and no indication that you plan to add 32 new national HD channels to fill that space in the near future, why downgrade the service right now?

FYI, the bitrates on the SD channels seem to be about the same as they were before, possibly with some negligible reductions. Much harder to tell with those.

And yes, I know several HD channels were moved from 77W to 72.7W. That explains the increase in the total number of HD channels on 72.7W, but not the overcrowding that's going on with them right now.

Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and this will all have been a bad dream. ;)
 
Run it again

Here's some info I just collected. Each row shows the transponder number on Nimiq 5 and the bitrate of the null PID.

1 - 4.0 Mbps
3 - 39.7 Mbps
5 - 11.7 Mbps
7 - 1.7 Mbps
9 - 2.4 Mbps
11 - 12.3 Mbps
13 - 0.7 Mbps (8 HD channels)
15 - 11.7 Mbps
17 - 1.2 Mbps (8 HD channels)
19 - 12.2 Mbps
21 - 13.1 Mbps
23 - 11.9 Mbps
25 - 12.2 Mbps
27 - 0.5 Mbps (9 HD channels, one often but not always fixed to using 1.0 Mbps)
29 - 11.7 Mbps
31 - 12.4 Mbps

159.4 Mbps of unused capacity, yet at least 8 HD channels per transponder? For reference, it was 4-5 HD per transponder when they were 30 Mbit QPSK muxes, so about 5-7 HD per transponder would be expected for similar bitrates in 40 Mbit 8PSK muxes. We already know Dish has been cramming up to 8 HD channels on 8PSK transponders on other satellites already, but when you have almost 160 Mbps to spare and no indication that you plan to add 32 new national HD channels to fill that space in the near future, why downgrade the service right now?

FYI, the bitrates on the SD channels seem to be about the same as they were before, possibly with some negligible reductions. Much harder to tell with those.

And yes, I know several HD channels were moved from 77W to 72.7W. That explains the increase in the total number of HD channels on 72.7W, but not the overcrowding that's going on with them right now.

Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and this will all have been a bad dream. ;)

Think you better run your test again after you get up. So we can see what they are running today now that they have finished the shift.
 
Interesting.... I didn't see anything on the reports indicating they did anything last night. Figured they would with the "off air" stuff you guys were reporting.
 
"Off Air" was appearing in the guide when Dish was sending down two sets of event information at the same time for most or all channels and covering most or all time slots. One set included the normal scheduled events, and the other consisted of back-to-back 8-hour "Off Air" entries. The "Off Air" set seemed to have priority over the normal set, but I didn't dig too deep to see exactly what was going on.

As of yesterday afternoon this didn't appear to be a problem any longer. It's a shame though that some people missed shows due to this mistake as it never should have happened in the first place. I understand marking a couple of time slots as "Off Air" during the time a change is scheduled to take place, which is what I have seen Dish do in the past. Flooding the schedule with "Off Air" entries just looks lazy though.
 
Quick update on the bitrate info reported last night. The attached picture shows 9 HD channels in one mux. Most of them are pay-per-view channels, so I'm sure that makes customers paying a premium for those feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

At least one other HD channel (HDNet Movies) in another mux was being treated even worse than any of these channels, sitting around 2-2.5 Mbps last night. The same channel was enjoying an average of about 4.5 Mbps on 110W during the same time periods so it wasn't a case of them receiving a highly compressible feed all of a sudden. Prior to the 8PSK switch, the bitrates for this and other HD channels that were already on 72.7W were similar to those on 110W. I'll probably post some bitrate graphs on this later. :)
 

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Attached is a bitrate graph for the same program on channel 9423 (HDNMV) from 110W and 72.7W last night. Trend lines showing the moving averages over 60 seconds are also given since the spikes can be distracting. All bitrates shown include both the audio and video PIDs. Each AC-3 audio PID contibutes about 395 kbps to the total.

From my observations, HD channels on 61.5W and 72.7W generally have a minimum bitrate of about 2.0 Mbps for the video PID. On 110W, the minimum is about 1.0 Mbps. Some exceptions are made for things such as event channels that aren't always "on."

In the graph, you can see that on 72.7W the bitrate tends to be bottomed out (2.0 Mbps Video + 395 kbps Audio ~= 2.4 Mbps). That minimum is supposed to be a safety net to fall back on if other channels in the mux need to hog bits briefly so that every channel at least has some bits guaranteed to it. The video isn't supposed to sit right around that level for any extended period of time, yet the average over that entire graph is about 2.45 Mbps for the video PID (2.85 Mbps for video+audio). The average on 110W for same time period was about 4.0 Mbps for the video PID (4.4 Mbps for video+audio).

I threw in a second graph for fun. It shows samples from 72.7W on 10/21 (before going to 8PSK) and on 10/22. It's not the same program so the peaks and such are very different, but they're both from channel 9423 and that's what graphs generally look like from 61.5W and what 72.7W looked like before the switch to 8PSK.

As an up-to-the-moment report, the video PID on channel 9423 is averaging 2.68 Mbps right now on 72.7W while everything else in that mux is averaging 4.19 Mbps or higher over a 19-minute time period. Considering that HDNet Movies is one of the few HD channels that actually airs HD programming all day every day, something is very fishy about the poor treatment the channel is suddenly getting.
 

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Over night last night PLAYBOY said Off Air but it was running just no info on the channel. It may be something like this and they are really there but no guide info.

...
Yep, they do that when moves are scheduled at night.

Thanks you two for your replies, after I posted that I went ahead and did a guide update and that took care of the problem.
Ghpr13:)
 
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