This has been discussed off and on, but there seem to be assorted problems with the current generation of DiseqC switches, particularly the 4x1 type.
Right now, I own 5 DiseqC switches.
(1) A Pansat 2x1 Tone Burst / DiseqC 1.0 switch bought from Sadoun 3 or 4 years ago.
(2) A Sadoun 4x1
DiseqC switch bought from Sadoun a year or two ago.
(3) An AIT 2x1 DiseqC 2.0 switch.
(4) A DMS international 4x1 DiseqC 2.0 switch.
(5) A Coolsat 4x1 DiseqC 1.2 switch. {I thought DiseqC 1.2 was a motor spec, and thought the switch specs were the 1.0 and 2.0????}
The only one of the above, which works reliably is #1, unfortunately, Sadoun no longer sells these switches, and I haven't located another source for them.
Switch #2 came dead on one port out of the box, and over a few months became dead on the other ports. It came back to life temporarily but died again.
I was hoping that Switch #3 might be similar to the Pansat 2x1, but it seems to have the same problems that the other new 4x1 switches have. The Coolsat switch seems to be the best of the 4x1 switches, but they all seem to both reduce the voltage that gets to the LNBF, enough that the lnbf has problems switching to the 18V polarity, sometimes the switch itself doesn't switch, and much more annoying is that all these new LNBFs seem to have a significant insertion loss.
This insertion loss thing is confusing to me in that I don't see any reason for it. One of the switches actually came with a spec which was listed as being something like 3 DB. I can understand why a 4x1 or 2x1 splitter should have losses like this, but I can't understand why a switch would be this bad. But even if there WAS a reason for it, why is my old DiseqC 1.0 switch so much better than all the other switches. Ie if I'm tuned to a signal, and replace the Pansat switch with any of the other switches, the signal level drops in half. I really think there must be more than volume and loss leaders, etc to the reason these new switches are selling in the $5 range when they used to sell for much more.
Anyway, I'm wondering what other people's experiences are, with respect to insertion loss using these switches? And also, I notice that there are 2 types of the "Sadoun" 4x1 switch, ie the all 5 ports on one side version, and the 3 on one side, 2 on the other version. I wonder what the difference is between these two?? All the 3/2 switches seem to be identical, regardless of who puts their sticker on top, but that all on one side switch seems different.
Anyone know where to get Pansat DiseqC 1.0 switches anymore???