Quote:
Originally Posted by q12345
Don't mean to hijack this thread, but does the Mercury II display the name of the satellite it is pointing to? I'm also looking for another receiver, and my Viewsat Ultra has this feature. It was very handy when I was trying to get G25 and it told me I was pointing to G3C. But the Ultra is a bit pricy, so I'm hoping to save a few bucks. Thanks for the great info guys!  |
This "feature" is something that confused me when people first started posting about it.
Really none of these FTA receivers have the capability of figuring out for sure what sat they are on, however some of them seem to do it somehow, however I think as often as not, they tend to make mistakes. I'm not completely sure how they do it, but I'm guessing that they lock onto a transponder and look for the NIT stream. Sometimes this NIT stream tells what satellite you're on, however often it doesn't and often it tells the wrong satellite.
Re the Mercury, I don't do much searching with my Mercury, so my memory is a bit faulty here. I can't remember in what windows it does this, but there at least one window where in the upper right (I think) it will pop up some info about what sat the receiver *thinks* it's on. I distinctly remember programming in a new satellite, and being surprised when the Mercury tried to tell me what satellite and channel it was seeing. So I think that to some extent, the Mercury has the feature you're referring to. However, I sure wouldn't choose one receiver over another based on this feature, because it is not really a very reliable thing, because the receiver really has no way of knowing what sat it's on, so it's just guessing. I have seen more than one post here from people who thought they were on one sat, but were really on another, based on things like this.
Re GoGiant's original question though, I don't have a
Classic to compare to, but I do have a Lifetime and an Ultra. The Mercury seems to have very nice picture quality compared to the other Fortec receivers, but only if you use the component output, otherwise there isn't much difference. Re searching, it does seem to search a bit faster than my Ultra, but I'm not sure which is best. I have tried searching the same signal with both Ultra and Mercury, and sometimes the Mercury does a better job and other times the Ultra does, and I think search wise, the Classic is probably similar to the Ultra. Re uploading new firmware, for the Lifetime and Ultra, this was an absolute necessity, as these receivers either had bugs or didn't have advertised features until you upgraded the firmware. I don't know about the Classic and firmware. The Mercury on the otherhand, people seem to be posting about the newer firmware having significant bugs. I don't have the original firmware in mine. I upgraded from 1.06 to 1.33 when I got mine, primarily because I was having problems with the
AC3 output not working correctly, however the upgrade didn't solve the problem. I didn't have the 1.06 installed long enough to know if there were bugs, but the 1.33 certainly has some bugs, and from what Bill190 has posted, the more recent versions have even more problems. So at least with the Mercury, you are better off with the older versions, but I'm still hopind that they will come out with a new firmware that fixes some problems, but I think that they must be focusing all their work on trying to come out with a new
HD receiver rather than fixing their old receivers unfortunately. But I sure wouldn't rule out uploading firmware updates on any receiver, because generally receivers come out with bugs that need to be corrected.
My biggest complaint about the Mercury, and I think that the Classic is the same, but i'm not positive, is that the channel editor is next to worthless, because it doesn't give you any control over many important things, such as the DiseqC1.2 sat numbers, and several other important channel/sat/transponder data items. Also, they keep the channel data file in a format that makes it hard for 3rd party programs to work with it. The Lifetime and Ultra have nice useful channel editors that save files that can be used with other programs. I think the Classic is more similar to the Mercury in this respect.