I just received a
Mercury today too. Hooked it up, and did some preliminary tests. The video quality seems to be better than I was getting with my Lifetime and Ultra. I tried some blind scans using I think the 6 MHz spacing and detailed locking (I'm not sure what these really imply yet, I'm guessing it is more complicated than what it says in the manual). The blind scan found transponders with SRs between 4,000 and 20,000, but it failed to locate a transponder with a 30,000 SR. When I manually entered the freq/SR, it immediately locked and I scanned in the channels. Tomorrow, I'll try some different settings for the blind scan to see if I can find settings that can find both low and high SR transponders. The scanning speed seems not too different from the Ultra, although I didn't really time it.
The user interface is much quicker than with the Ultra, because you can get to several functions directly without having to back out of menu branch and up another branch. It's also nice that it seems like you can control the thing from front panel buttons, rather than me needing to run upstairs and get my remote. (I keep my remotes upstairs and usually run my receivers remotely, but it's nice to be able to control things right from the receiver too.) I also found that as other's reported, that it doesn't seem to interfere with my other Fortec receivers, which is nice. I didn't run into any example (yet) of the high quality/low signal thing, but I've only looked at one satellite so far, AMC3.
So far, my only complaint is that there are so many buttons on the remote, that it's hard to find the buttons I need. It looks like they have tried to make it easier for most people by color coding some of the buttons, but I'm a bit color blind, so I'm having a bit of a problem with a couple of the colors. I also need to go get an optical cable to hook up the
spdif port to listen to the AC3. Hopefully RS has them.