Sat TV - first port of call to solve problems

[chessfou]

A while ago I started a thread here about problems we were having with a part (dish 2 for Astra 2D) of our sat system - 2 dishes, 3 LNBs for Astra 1, Astra 2 & Hotbird, i.e. CSAT, TPS (plus some useful German, Italian, Russian and Spanish channels) & UK. Various good ideas were suggested. However, further problems emerged with radio reception (all channels dead) and an impossibility to receive TPS Foot (aarghh! who wants TPS except for the Foot?). Anyway, all problems now solved. It turned out to be a problem with the decoder (Aston Simba 202 - excellent top of range piece of kit).

There is a potential (likely) problem with using the "automatic" channel search, especially with a wide-ranging system (multiple LNBs). This particular Aston box becomes "saturated" at the 3000 channel mark (that's everything - TV channels, Radio channels, Favourites, erased channels). The result of saturation is such weird problems as we had. Solution - reset the box to "original" state and then manually install (mainly by transponder - i.e. bunches of channels by "bouquet"). Result everything working perfectly (fingers and toes crossed).

Anyway, I think that this possibility (decoder saturation) should be the first port of call.

I haven't noticed any warning about this in the manual. It seems the decoder was saturated the very first time we hooked it up and ran an auto search (at that time just the one dish & 2 LNBs for Astra 1 & Hotbird).