Satellite Scan Question

[glen4cindy]

Just purchased a FortecStar Lifetime Ultra STB from E-Bay. When it arrived, the only sats that had channels were Dish Network so I suspect that someone thought they could get programming with an FTA box. The firmware was factory, so I suspect that once they found they could not they sold it.

I scanned a few sats and tried to download the data with gTools but ran into some problems, so I did a factory restore.

I just finished scanning G 25 (this box calls it T6 but that isn't important). It found a bunch of channels called TV 201, TV 221, TV 303, etc. and the same with the radio side only they were called Radio xxx.

What channels are doing this? I did a blind scan to find active transponders and it found 23 then scanned those for channels. I specified FTA in the type where you could choose ALL or FTA. I don't recall those being there the first time, but, then again, I did not do a Blind Scan either.

Thanks!

[rainman]

alot of times if the name of the channel is not in the data stream it gives the sid number for the channel name. a lot of the globecast channels are this way. also the pbs channels does this on amc 3.

[glen4cindy]

Hmmm that is strange because the Lifetime NA did not name the channels this way and neither did the Ultra until AFTER I did a factory restore!

The first time I scanned it, there were no channels with odd names like that.

[wejones]

If you are interested in where these names come from, I recommend that you get a Twinhan 1020a or 102g PCI card, and run the program Tsreader. It shows all the different data streams in one of these satellite signals. The stream you tune to has several streams. The only ones necessary to view a channel are the audio and video PIDs, but these don't contain the name of the channel. Usually, the name of the channel shows up in another stream called the SDT (service definition table), but sometimes it shows up in the NIT (network information table). Sometimes there will be names found in some othere PIDs as well. Often the SDT or NIT, etc will be missing from a feed, or often it will have incorrect info, ie the uplinkers just don't bother entering the info, since it isn't necessary. Also, for feeds that are part of a network, sometimes the SDT and NIT will list a whole bunch of channel names from different transponders and different satellites. One receiver/program would pop up a different channel name every time I tuned in a particular channel, because it was picking up info from another part of the network.
From what I've seen, different receivers pick up the names from different PIDs. Some may grab it from the SDT some from the NIT some from wherever it can find a name. But if it doesn't find a name, then most just use the services program number, which is listed in the PAT I think.
Anyway, again, I recommend Tsreader to anyone interested in seeing how these things work. I don't really understand most of what I see there, but it's interesting viewing.

[pictureon]

I noticed that when you scan while having a somehow low signal on a transponder (say 11874), you get channel numbers instead of the names. Maybe that's the case here ???