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Taken the Foxsat Plunge


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Old 21-10-2010, 12:26
LarryPlane
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Refurb Foxsat HDR ordered from Humax.

Engineer booked for next Wednesday.

I'll let you all know how I got on. Might be useful for anyone else sitting on the freeview/sat fence.

Any words of advice from those that have trod this road before?
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Old 21-10-2010, 13:07
boyzie
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Basically just enjoy it I would say.
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Old 21-10-2010, 16:26
victorslot
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I bought a refurb Foxsat back in August before giving up Sky. Am 100% satisfied with it and unless there is a major revamp of how Sky sell their packages I won't return. There is a small learning curve on it's use but after a couple of weeks even the wife finds it at least as good as the Sky box. Picture quality is great and have not had any missed recordings or other glitches.

I have also bought a refurb Freeview Humax 9300T to sit alongside the study TV so I have the best of both free TV worlds.
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Old 21-10-2010, 16:54
LarryPlane
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Update: about 4 hours after ordering from humax direct, they sent me a text message to say the goods were on there way. A short while after that I received an email with the tracking number

I'll have the box over tue weekend although it won't be connected to the dish, is it still possible to set up and use the iPlayer
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Old 21-10-2010, 17:00
GaseousClay
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is it still possible to set up and use the iPlayer
Fraid not. You need to be tuned to a BBC channel (not including CBBC or CBeebies). There you will get the red button prompt and you need to select iplayer from the menu.
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Old 21-10-2010, 17:03
LarryPlane
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Ah okay, fair enough. I'll just test for power up and hdmi output.

Can you tell I'm excited
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Old 21-10-2010, 17:04
GaseousClay
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Can you tell I'm excited
And so you should be..
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Old 22-10-2010, 13:49
LarryPlane
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Foxsat arrived this morning as promised by the delivery company, posting me little text messages and emails as it went from van to van. Great firm to order from if you have no friends as the amount of text and email messages is just shy of stalking.

Anyway, box arrived. No damage to the outer box and the refurbished unit looks as good as new. Documentation appeared to be new and the unit was supplied with a HDMI lead, an RCA lead and batteries for the remote control.

First thing I did after the inspection was to remove the plastic film that runs along the front of the unit as this can apparently hinder remote control signals. I then opened up the front flap and located the second plastic film that runs along the inside of the unit, covering the display for the same reason.

Remote in operation shows no sign of lag or signs of being overly sensitive to direction.

Plugged it in and booted it up. Found no signals, but that's because the install man doesn't come until Wednesday. The foxsat is a good unit, but even it needs a connection to the outside world.

Ran through a few of the menus, setting stuff up as I went. For some reason it didn't want to display in wide screen until I switched my Toshiba TV settings around a bit. Then it was cool. While in the menu system I found the Hard Drive section, selected both the Video and Photo partition for formatting so that it would give me the option on deciding how big each section is. I have the xbox 360 for photos so I pushed the Foxsat photo partition right down to 5gb, freeing up the rest for video. Formatting after the partition change took just a few minutes.

While I was in the menu I also changed the pre-record options from auto to 5 minutes.

While I was messing about with the remote I set it to the codes given in the back. The Foxsat remote can now control my Xbox 360 and my TV, as well as the Foxsat of course.

At this point I was a little bored. The sat man doesn't come for nearly a week (well less but who's counting) and the current LNB points at a sat to pick up German channels for my wife. Tempted as I was, I switched off both units and changed the sat cable from the old box to the foxsat, did a reboot, allowed for a channel scan (non-freesat mode) and that worked.

While looking through the channel selection I found EinFestival HD, which is a German HD demo channel. This is the first time I've seen HD on my own TV (movies aside) and all I can say is WOW!!!!! Absolutely stunning.

And that's as far as I can go now until the man with the LNB and cable turns up next week.

Be a shame to move the cable back from the Foxsat to the old sat reciever my wife uses and I was wondering if it is possible for the Foxsat to take a feed from three cables, in this case, two cables from a dual LNB pointed at Freesat and one cable from an LNB pointing at the German sat.

That possible? Or a stretch too far?
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Old 22-10-2010, 14:24
grahamlthompson
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A bit of advice, the hdr can read jpegs and mp3's from an external drive (and compatible video) pretty well as big as you wan't (I use a 1TB with mine). So unless you specifically want to upload lots of stuff make the photo/music partition it's minimum size of 1GB.

Good news the hdr iin non-freesat mode is diseqc/usals capable so you can connect multiple lnbs on different satellites using a diseqc switches. Using twin or quad lnbs you can give each tuner a diseqc switch so you can record two channels from different satellites at the same time (manual recording only sadly)

http://foxsat-hdr.wikispaces.com/DiSEqC
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Old 22-10-2010, 14:27
LarryPlane
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Cool. Can I set this up for just the twin LNB on Freesat and then add the switch at a later point to bring in the other LNB?

Oh and can you recommend a good switch?
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Old 22-10-2010, 14:44
grahamlthompson
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Cool. Can I set this up for just the twin LNB on Freesat and then add the switch at a later point to bring in the other LNB?

Oh and can you recommend a good switch?
YES ?

NO ?. They all seem to work pretty much the same

You will likely get a quad lnb anyway especially if they install a Sky MK4 minidish (they don't make twins for these).
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Old 22-10-2010, 14:54
LarryPlane
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Going to be running the system from an existing sat dish (non-sky) that was already in place and has a single LNB currently pointed at the German sat (Hotbird???). The sat man is going to add a bracket to take a second LNB (a dual) and then re-point both LNB's to hopefully pick up the German sat channels and the Freesat ones.
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Old 22-10-2010, 15:00
grahamlthompson
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Going to be running the system from an existing sat dish (non-sky) that was already in place and has a single LNB currently pointed at the German sat (Hotbird???). The sat man is going to add a bracket to take a second LNB (a dual) and then re-point both LNB's to hopefully pick up the German sat channels and the Freesat ones.
Right the guy clearly knows what he's doing, why not get him to bring a diseqc switch (they are not expensive)
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Old 22-10-2010, 15:03
LarryPlane
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That's a good idea.

I've used this firm before, they set up the LNB from sky (previous owner) to German sat. Always worked fine.
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Old 22-10-2010, 15:10
buglawton
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Larry, can you give the details of how you were picking up the German channels - dish size, sat name etc? I'm looking for a UK recipe for this. If it is poss to share dish with offset LNBs for the usual UK Freesat stuff, it's also of interest.
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Old 22-10-2010, 16:43
LarryPlane
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Sure, I tell you what, once (if) it's working I'll post a few pictures.

But briefly it's just an 80 cm dish with a Maplin LNB plugged into an old Humax sat receiver that I picked up from ebay for not much money.
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Old 22-10-2010, 18:35
mgb77
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While looking through the channel selection I found EinFestival HD, which is a German HD demo channel. This is the first time I've seen HD on my own TV (movies aside) and all I can say is WOW!!!!! Absolutely stunning.
And what about Das Erste HD, ZDF HD, Arte HD,Anixe HD, Servus HD. Did you find them?
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Old 22-10-2010, 21:28
LarryPlane
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Only seen one hd channel listed that I can access.
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Old 22-10-2010, 22:32
mgb77
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Enable network search.
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Old 22-10-2010, 23:11
LarryPlane
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Which menu setting is that (only got the unit today )
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Old 23-10-2010, 00:12
mgb77
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In the manual scan menu there is a network search option.
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Old 23-10-2010, 06:39
LarryPlane
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And what about Das Erste HD, ZDF HD, Arte HD,Anixe HD, Servus HD. Did you find them?
Did the search with network selected and none of the above channels show on the list.

EDIT: did another search allowing the Foxsat to look at scrambled channels and Arte HD showed up, but couldn't be viewed because (obviously) it's scrambled. None of the others show up either as scrambled or non-scrambled channels. Let me know if you have any other ideas I can try. Full install isn't until Wednesday so I don't mind experimenting a bit.
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Old 23-10-2010, 07:52
LarryPlane
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Update: I found this info


Empfangsparameter Das Erste HD:
Transponder 11 ASTRA 19.2° Ost
Frequenz 11,362 GHz
Polarisation horizontal
Fehlerschutz FEC 2/3
Symbolrate 22 MSymbols/s
Übertragungsstandard: DVB-S2

Had another look at the manual tune and I found the User Defined setting in TRANSPONDER (entered manual tune via the RGYBGYB combo). I altered the transponder to include the 11362 freq (wasn't listed before), changed polarisation from Manual to Horizontal, symbol rate to 22000 (not 22 as shown), changed transmission to DVBS and modulation to 8PSK, oh and FEC to 2/3.

Once I did all that, I started to show a strength a quality reading on the meters below. I saved those settings, then did a search and straight away Das Erste HD, ZDF HD and Arte HD showed up.

No luck with the other so far.
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Old 24-10-2010, 07:46
LarryPlane
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I've managed also now to add Anixe HD by manually entering the frequency and other details. Looks great. Not as good though as Das Erste HD is fantastic. Watched a program on the Berlin Zoo yesterday and it was like WOW....

Found Sat1HD and Proseiben HD as well, but both of these are encrypted.
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Old 28-10-2010, 09:10
LarryPlane
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Update - Sat man failed to turn up yesterday. Apparently the Sky Arm for the two LNB's hadn't turned up. Might have been nice if he called to tell me that, but hey, what's a waisted afternoon compared with the full arc of life!

Waiting now to see when my next appointment will be. Until then my FoxSat is an expensive paperweight.
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