TT Budget S2-1600 Poor Performance

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Hello All

 

I have a PC/Server running DVBViewer and the recording service with 3 PCI satellite cards (a couple of Compro S350 DVB-S cards and a Hauppauge Win-TV Nova HD-S2 card) plus a Hauppage Nova-TD 500 Dual DVB-T PCI card, all of which works very well. As more satellite transponders are using DVB-S2, I needed to upgrade one of the S350 DVB-S cards with a DVB-S2 card but didn't want to spend too much money on a PCI card as I hope to upgrade the PC next year to one with PCI-E slots.

 

To bridge the gap I bought a Technotrend Budget S2-1600 PCI card and installed it using the latest BDA drivers from Technotrend's support site. DVBViewer found the card OK and it appeared to work initially, but there seemed to be a lot of signal glitches and I found that the card's performance seems poor compared to the Hauppage DVB-S2 card. Using Transedit I checked the signal quality and errors on one of the DVB-S2 FTA transponders on Astra 28.2E - the Hauppage card shows 94% quality and no dropped packets whilst the TT S2-1600 card has only 76% quality and lots of missing packets.

 

I've done the obvious things - tried different drivers, checked the connections and swapped the LNB feeds over etc but the problem seems to be related to the card.

 

Before I send the card back, has anyone else had similar problems and found a fix?

 

Thanks for any help!

 

Derek.

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An update - I did some work over the weekend to try and narrow down the cause of the problem, and here's a bit more information about the problem that others may find useful.

 

The PC in question has a Gigabyte GA8-PE667 Pro motherboard fitted with a P4 3.2GHz processor and 2GB of RAM, running Windows Server 2003 32-bit and is easily capable of capturing a DVB-S2 stream alongside a couple of DVB-S streams with no glitches.

 

I started by removing all other DVB cards and installed the S2-1600 on its own, after which the signal quality stayed around 75% but there were no missed packets on a DVB-S2 transponder even after an hour of testing. I tried re-installing the other DVB cards, one at a time and found that fitting *any* other DVB card (either Terrestrial or Satellite) resulted in the dropped packet issue recurring almost immediately on the S2-1600 only - where necessary I selectively disabled the hardware in Transedit to force each card to be used and only the S2-1600 had any dropped packets. I tried using drivers from both the supplied CD-ROM and also the latest version from the Technotrend support site, but the results were the same.

 

I checked the motherboard manual to see which PCI slots had shared IRQs and made sure that the S2-1600 was fitted to a non-shared PCI slot, but there was no change. I checked the BIOS settings and also the resources (I/O, Memory and IRQs) in Windows but all was OK. As a side issue I also ran Memtest to make sure that the RAM was OK and this reported no errors after two full test cycles.

 

After doing this and finding nothing obvioulsy wrong I decided that the S2-1600 card just wasn't worth the bother. I'll e-mail Technotrend out of curiosity but the card will probably be going back to the supplier (hopefully) for a refund.

 

Can anyone recommend a reasonably priced DVB-S2 PCI card that is a bit less "fussy" and will work alongside the other cards in my system?

 

Thanks for any advice!

 

Derek.