There have been numerous posts about the weird behavior of the Lifetime Ultra when the number of transponders exceeds the limit of 1300. I've had this problem in the past, so I've been careful to keep watch on the number of transponders I've had saved. Often if I start to have problems, I just delete a transponder, and am then able to function again.
Well for the past couple weeks, I've been having problems with the Ultra. Initially it manifested itself in not being able to scan in new channels. Ie I would do a power scan, and it would find transponders, however after finding the transponders, it would do it's normal search for channels, would crunch a bit on each transponder, but would not come up with any new channels. This didn't bother me, because I seldom watch TV via the Ultra, so what I would do was just write down the freq/sr and tune them in with my
Twinhan. I assumed that the problem must be that I was over the channel limit or something.
Well then yesterday, I went to a sat, on which I had a few channels stored, tuned up on one of these channels, then did a power scan. The Ultra went through, and didn't find ANY transponders... this even though the Ultra was currently tuned to one of them. So I went in, and deleted a few unused transponders. Didn't help. I went back in, and deleted two satellites, and a bunch of channels. This finally helped, and I was able to do power scans again.
Just now, I decided to hook up to the computer and see how many transponders/channels I had saved, and to my surprise, I was well under the 1300 limit, and well under the 2001 channel limit. However what I found, was that (before my deletions) I had come up against the limit of satellites, and "Active Transponders". I had not even noticed before that there WAS a limit for Active Transponders, but it turns out that you can only have 500 active transponders. Apparently, if you reach this limit, and do a power scan, it cannot add channels to a transponder that previously didn't have channels, and if the transponder itself wasn't previously saved, you can't even scan in a new transponder. It doesn't even show up while scanning, which is surprising.
Anyway, one more thing to keep your eye on with respect to the ULTRA, ie ACTIVE TRANSPONDERS. I now also have to figure out what satellites I can delete, since I seem to have reached the maximum number of satellites, and have a couple new sats I've wanted to add.
EDIT: Oh yeah, I was going to comment on what I *THINK* an Active Transponder actually is. I THINK that is a transponder which has a channel saved associated with it, but I'm not positive.
Linear Mode
