My first receiver: Mercury II

[niknar1900]

(i'm not in the satellite biz or even a professional, so this is just the musings of some shmuck and his first receiver)

My first real receiver, the FortecStar Mercury II.
It's really affordable, and brings the bare essentials.
No hard drive (PVR), no ethernet (network), nothing fancy.
There's another version, that the manual talks about, that has a CAS for payed programming. But that one is probably available outside of North America.

It's small and fairly light compared to say a standard DirecTV receiver (DRD430)

And it has component, but it only does 480i not 480p, so what's the point of having component then?
4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios didn't change anything for me, even when used on a 4:3 and 16:9 tv.


Optical out for digital sound. Just turn off that "SPDIF Output" setting for those channels that don't play in stereo, like PBS, and now they play in stereo. Regardless of whether or not this setting is on or off, there is always data on this port.
It automatically figures out what satellite you're looking at, so no need to write down any tp numbers or channel names. Look up in the upper right corner of the "Antenna Setup" menu, wait a minute, and it'll tell you.


When it comes to encrypted channels, it'll tell you what it's encrypted with. But just because it's Echostar7 that doesn't mean there aren't any free channels on their. NASA, a few DishNet info channels, and even a few locals, like CBS, NBC and so on. and radio!

And! it has animated menus . Alright, so it's not that special, but it adds a certain something to the experience. I made a video, going through the menus and watching a little tv, i found the ending kind of funny.
~48MB, WMV
http://niknar.com/niknar1900/mercuryII.wmv
and these are all the thumbs:
Index of /niknar1900/Mercury2

Put that 18" dish that's lying around and put it to some use. Checkout those Echostars, and if you really want to see the good stuff on there, do yourself a favor and get a subscription.

[be236]

Nice screen shots.. I like their menu system... seems simple and nice fonts, etc...

[slotzero]

Great post - thanks for sharing - this newbie appreciates it!

[rainman]

nice reveiw looking forward to getting the Mercury II to replace the Satworks(it won't do AC3) will use the Mercury on my c band dish to get the AC3 channels like the mens channel.

[Reinhold]

I just got mine new.
It switches flawlessly between AC3 and regular sound.
Compared to the Lifetime Ultra.it is very easy to add transponders or to erase channels.It does a good blindscan.Also for combined KU/C band,it breaks down most of the sats to KU and C.
All in all pretty good.
The only trouble I had was downloading liniar sats using a disquc switch
.
For the timebeing I am not using one.There is not that much on rotary transponders anyway,alas it is too cold right now to be up on the roof.
Reinhold.

[rainman]

yeah agreed Reinhold pretty cold here also and just got about 6" of snow on top of it. as soon as it warms up a little got a new feedhorn and lnbs to put on my big dish along with a new acuator arm.ahh dreaming of spring.LOL

[siliggy]

PID Question:
G'day. Could someone please comment on the " Manual PID scan function"
and or this statement from the blurb "The M-II is one of the few consumer receivers that will identify the frequency, symbol rate, polarity, FEC and even the PIDS"

In Australia there are several channels that most recievers cannot find. They have hidden PIDS. Entering the correct frequency and symbol rate even FEC will not get them even if a good signal shows because the signal does not contain the PID information. Manualy entering or editing the PID values will get them on some recievers but not all. Thats great if you already know they are there.

Does the Mercury II find them on it's own?

[rainman]

you can do a power scan with the mercury and it will find most stuff but there are a few TP you must enter manual something to do with the way the stream comes down from the sat I belive wejones might be able to explain it better as he uses TS reader to watch the way these signal comes down.

[wejones]

Originally Posted by siliggy

PID Question:
G'day. Could someone please comment on the " Manual PID scan function"
and or this statement from the blurb "The M-II is one of the few consumer receivers that will identify the frequency, symbol rate, polarity, FEC and even the PIDS"

In Australia there are several channels that most recievers cannot find. They have hidden PIDS. Entering the correct frequency and symbol rate even FEC will not get them even if a good signal shows because the signal does not contain the PID information. Manualy entering or editing the PID values will get them on some recievers but not all. Thats great if you already know they are there.

Does the Mercury II find them on it's own?

As Rainman mentioned, if you want to understand more about the satellite signals, a PCI card receiver and the TSREADER program is really educational. I didn't know anything about how these signals were transmitted until I started looking at TSREADER, and it really helps.

Most sat signals have a bunch of data packets coming down, each type packet is identified by numbers, ie PIDs. When a receiver is told to scan a transponder, the first thing it does is look for a stream of packets called the PAT, or program allocation table. The PAT has a list of PIDs for streams called PMTs, which are program map tables. Basically each PMT defines a channel. Each PMT will generally list the PID#s of the video and audio streams for that channel. Once the receiver has read the PAT and PMTs, it can then store a list of channels with the corresponding VPIDs and APIDs.
However, some sat signals, such as the WB (CW) transponder on G11, don't have either the PAT or the PMT streams, so there is no way for the receiver to figure out which streams have the video and which streams have the audio for each channel. However, if the receiver has an advanced scan option or manual PID scan capability, you can enter that info yourself for each channel, ie tell the receiver what the audio and video PID #s are for each channel. Then, the receiver can scan in the channel.
In the case of the CW transponder, there is no PAT and no PMTs. On some other transponders, they have a PAT, which may list some channels, but the PMTs may be missing for other channels. On still other transponders, there may be both PAT and PMT, but the PMTs may be missing the PID information, so the receiver can't figure out what to do.
This is all easy to see when you run TSREADER.

Re the blurb about the "The M-II is one of the few consumer receivers that will identify the frequency, symbol rate, polarity, FEC and even the PIDS" , that really doesn't seem that unusual to me. In the past, if you knew the frequency and symbol rate, most receivers would figure out the rest, however now most receivers have a blind scan or power scan that figures out the frequency and symbol rate. So compared to a few years ago it may be one of the few, but compared to current models, it is pretty much the same features that other receivers have. The only unusual feature I've noticed about the M-II is that it has component output, whereas most other receivers only have composite video. This does give better video if you have an HDTV with a component input. If you use the composite output though, the M-II video is no different from other receivers. I wish I could use the M-II into my new HDTV, however I still haven't figured out how to get audio from AC3 channels, other than running to a separate stereo. So my Mercury-II is still sitting there un-used for the most part.

[siliggy]

Thankyou for that info wejones. Seems TSREADER is the best way to go. Had heard of it before. Several of the Aussie sat fanatics have it. The blurb for that blind scanner did get my hopes up a bit. I already have a blind scanner that does the basic stuff (Manhattan ST120). Unfortunately this PC is a bit old n slow for that so It will wait untill the next PC upgrade. I have found some stuff by guessing and using incremental manual PID entering but it takes a very long time.

[wejones]

Originally Posted by siliggy

Thankyou for that info wejones. Seems TSREADER is the best way to go. Had heard of it before. Several of the Aussie sat fanatics have it. The blurb for that blind scanner did get my hopes up a bit. I already have a blind scanner that does the basic stuff (Manhattan ST120). Unfortunately this PC is a bit old n slow for that so It will wait untill the next PC upgrade. I have found some stuff by guessing and using incremental manual PID entering but it takes a very long time.

I think you can only get blind scanning with a set top box. The PCI cards apparently have tuners that aren't suitable for quick scanning. TSREADER needs you to know the freq and SR , but then it will show you all sorts of info about the streams. It doesn't play by itself, but can stream video to other programs or other hardware. I think that the Twinhan card only requires a 400 MHz computer to work with SD, and that should give all the speed that TSREADER would need, but to play 4.2.2 or HD, you'd need a faster computer.

[bali]

hey guys i need a clue. will this receiver will let me hear the ac-3 audio
(converted to stereo) thru its own stereo output jacks ? no other ac-3
decoder required ? thanks

>>
"Optical out for digital sound. Just turn off that "SPDIF Output" setting for those channels that don't play in stereo, like PBS, and now they play in stereo. Regardless of whether or not this setting is on or off, there is always data on this port."

[wejones]

Originally Posted by bali

hey guys i need a clue. will this receiver will let me hear the ac-3 audio
(converted to stereo) thru its own stereo output jacks ? no other ac-3
decoder required ? thanks

>>
"Optical out for digital sound. Just turn off that "SPDIF Output" setting for those channels that don't play in stereo, like PBS, and now they play in stereo. Regardless of whether or not this setting is on or off, there is always data on this port."

THe answer is NO, the Mercury does NOT have the capability to decode the AC3. It can only pass the AC3 out the digital output. On AC3 channels you don't get any audio out of the R/L audio channels.
It's really unfortunate too, because it doesn't seem like a very expensive feature to add, but it probably involves them paying for the rights to a copywrited codec or something.

[bali]

thanks wejones for the clue !! thats what i thought but i needed to ask