Well, I did a bit of experimenting. Looking at the output of my program from MY
Mercury above, notice that before I deleted a channel near the top, I had the following:
6 AMC 1 ................---
7 AMC 2 ................6
8 AMC 3 .................7
9 AMC 4 Ku............... ---
ie AMC3 had it's location stored in DiseqC1.2 position #7, and I didn't have any position stored for AMC4-ku.
I then deleted a channel above these, and ended up with the following:
6 AMC 2 ................---
7 AMC 3 ................6
8 AMC 4 Ku.............7
9 AMC 4 C................ ---
Ie, the DiseqC1.2 sat numbers stayed in the same location in memory, but the sat names moved up one, because one sat was deleted above.
I put the Mercury on AMC 3, which cause it to actually move to the AMC2 position. Then, I hooked up the dish to another receiver (Twinhan), and told the motor to go to DiseqC1.2 position #7, and AMC3 came in.
Went back to the Mercury changed to another AMC3 channel, and the dish went to AMC2 again. I went into the Antenna setup, and turned the AMC3 positioner setting to OFF . Then went to AMC4-ku and turned the positioner setting to DiseqC1.2 { I did NOT SAVE anything, I just turned it to DiseqC1.2 and backed out of the menus}. I then went to an AMC4 channel. The dish moved to AMC3, although nothing came up because I was tuned to an AMC4 channel. I then went to an AMC3 channel. The dish didn't move, because I had positioner turned off, so it stayed aimed at AMC3. The AMC3 channel came up!
So anyway, for anyone who runs into this problem, this is a workaround to tune in channels until you have time to fix the situation.
So at this point, convinced that the Mercury didn't care what numbers were in that area of data, I decided to use a binary editor to change the DiseqC1.2 sat numbers back to where they should be. I corrected the numbers of about 5 sats which had been changed by the deletion, then brought the file up in the channel editor, and downloaded them to the Mercury. BINGO. Everything worked. I turned AMC3 back to DiseqC1.2, changed to an AMC3 channel, and it came right up.
So editing this area of memory DOES WORK. I can't guarantee that there might be some unforseen problems caused by the editing, but so far, so good.
I think that now I'm going to use the channel editor to delete all the sats I don't need, which will mess things up again, then go in and re-edit the file with the binary editor to get the sat names aligned with the DiseqC1.2 position numbers.
What I am a bit afraid to do, however, is to insert all the satellites I had previously saved with another receiver. Ie I had all the sats saved, using numbers from #20 through 60 or something like that. These positions are already on the
SG2100, so it would save me a LOT of time if I could just plunk in those numbers with the binary editor. However what I'm not sure of, is what the mercury will do if it sees say sat positions 2-11 saved, and then 12-19 not saved, and then 20-60 saved. Ie it seems to find the biggest number saved, say it's 60, and then use the next position when you save a new sat, but if the maximum diseqC1.2 position has been reached, then, the Mercury wouldn't be able to save any more sats, even though there were numbers not used (another bug in the Mercury software I think). Eventually I'll try this, but I want to think a bit first.