Empty Transponder Question

[glen4cindy]

How do all of you seasoned individuals find wild feeds? I just moved my motorized dish to SBS 6 at 74 W and I know there is only one channel there, but, I am just trying to get everything that I can.

However, Lyngsat shows 19 TP's but, since only one was active at the time I did my scan, it was the only one to show up.

So, do I just scan the satellite hoping to find something some day? Do I just confirm that the TP frequencies in my STB match those in Lyngsat? I found the College Football game that I posted here on Saturday night by finding AMC 3 and doing a power scan on it. Now, those "feed" TP's are black and the screen reads NO OR BAD SIGNAL.

So, educate me here. Thanks!

[rainman]

it's just a shot in the dark most of the time you just power scan a sat and it happens to be open at the time you scan.happy hunting.

[wejones]

How do all of you seasoned individuals find wild feeds? I just moved my motorized dish to SBS 6 at 74 W and I know there is only one channel there, but, I am just trying to get everything that I can.

However, Lyngsat shows 19 TP's but, since only one was active at the time I did my scan, it was the only one to show up.

So, do I just scan the satellite hoping to find something some day? Do I just confirm that the TP frequencies in my STB match those in Lyngsat? I found the College Football game that I posted here on Saturday night by finding AMC 3 and doing a power scan on it. Now, those "feed" TP's are black and the screen reads NO OR BAD SIGNAL.

So, educate me here. Thanks!

SBS6 has more than one active transponder. You should have come up with at least 2. There are a lot of signals that come and go though, like news feeds and sporting events.

One thing though, and even on sats that don't seem to have much on them, there is generally really a lot of use of that sat that we don't see, because it is in some mode that we can't receive, like data transmissions, etc. Sometimes even analog video. So it's usually not that the transponder is EMPTY, it's just that it's not in DVB format. Also, sometimes, to save money, some uplinkers send a very weak signal that we can't get strong enough to lock.
I just did a spectrum scan of SBS6, and found at least 16 strong signals there,and another dozen rather weak signals, but only a few that were DVB, or at least only a few that I could blind scan in, and only a few of those that had FTA video on them. I think I found 4 video transponders.

It's been making me a bit uncomfortable using the term transponder the way I have been, because I haven't been using it properly. Often the transponders on these sats can contain multiple signals, and we tend to talk about the individual signals as being transponders, however actually the transponder covers a band of frequencies. Back in the old analog days, you'd usually see only one video signal on a transponder, or perhaps two if it was a wide Ku transponder with two signals on it, however even back then, there were transponders out there that would have dozens of SCPC (single channel per carrier) signals on the same transponder. These were usually audio or data, not video. In today's digital world, you have transponders which might only have one broad MUX on it, but you also have transponders which have many narrow (low SR) signals on it. So typically we aren't really tuning the transponder so much as tuning a channel ON that transponder. Ie our transponder lists might have multiple "transponders" that are really the same transponder. Not really an important distinction though, and easier to just refer to the individual signals as transponders.

[William Eng]

While I am not a seasoned pro, I find lots of stuff by "casting a wide net". On your reciever, do a "FULL POWER SCAN" but also change the setting from FTA to ALL, also widened the scan frequencies (they are preset by the initial software), and also narrow the scan from 6 to 4. Afterwards, I go through each channel to see in anything comes up.

Sometimes all you get is audio and no video, like Starz Movie channel, A&E, etc. Othertimes, it is just video like CNBC at 99 and no audio.

Lynsat is only a guideline, some of the information is outdated. Some channels that have a $ are really FTA such as ETTV and Hakko on IA5. Some have been deleted like ZCimena on Echo and Blackbelt on Amazona, but it is still listed as FTA. Some channels are not even listed like KFTL-OAKLAND at 72.

[glen4cindy]

Awesome.

Thanks for the information.

[William Eng]

1. Rescan often. Sometimes an unused transponder will be active again.
2. Revisit channels that was initially empty, because sometimes someone will flip a switch and you will find something there.
3. Scan newly launched satellites. Occasionally, these satellites will broadcast FTA then get scrambled later.

[wejones]

1. Rescan often. Sometimes an unused transponder will be active again.
2. Revisit channels that was initially empty, because sometimes someone will flip a switch and you will find something there.
3. Scan newly launched satellites. Occasionally, these satellites will broadcast FTA then get scrambled later.

You'll also find a few channels that you wouldn't normally find, if you get one of the PCI cards that are compatable with TSREADER. Reason is, that sometimes there are channels up there that don't have their PIDs listed in the PAT. With TSREADER, you will see that encrypted streams are colored red, and FTA streams are green, and sometimes you'll see green streams, but no channel scans in. When this happens, sometimes it's just a data stream, but other times it is real audio/video streams that aren't listed. In TSREADER they show up as "Unknown". Tsreader allows you to make manual channels, ie specify the streams as being audio and video, and sometimes these will then be viewable. Doesn't happen often, but it does sometimes. The WB things were examples of this sort of thing. Ie they won't scan in as channels, but you can create a manual channel for them. But without a program like TSREADER, you wouldn't even know that they were there. I've probably found a half dozen of channels like this over the last few years. Often they don't last long. A couple of the channels I found like this were on the Echo and Nimiq sats. I'm thinking that sometimes they must think that it is easier to just hide the channels like this, instead of encrypting them.
Anyway, one more recommendation for TSREADER. It's a great program.