4DTV for Ku

[AntAltMike]

Would it be possible for any satellite manufacturer to make a Ku-capable satellite receiver any more useless than Motorola's 4DTV?

When I first installed a 4DTV several years ago, there were several "predefined" Ku satellites, as well as at least four assignable C-band designations and four assignable Ku band ones (CA-CD and KA-KD).

A year or so ago, there were just four predefined satellites and no assignable ones. That was a big problem for the sportsbar I was installing those receivers in.

Today, I just installed a 4DTV receiver with 24 C-band defined satellites, and just one Ku band: SBS-6

And it gets worse. SBS 6 only has 19 transponders on it even though there is room for 32, 30Mz-wide transponders in that slot. The predefiined SBS-6 satelite recognizes only 19 transponders, but they aren't the exact same ones that SBS-6 uses. SBS 6 doesn't use the 19 lowest frequency transponders, but as far as I can tell, 4DTV tunes the 19 lowest, so I can't even manually tune anything above transponder 12 because the manual fine tuning only allows me to tune the natural transponder 19 up anouther 20Mz

Bummer.

[JohnH]

SBS 6 has 19 wideband transponders which together cover the entire 500mhz. Sometimes a feed only uses half a transponder. In that case it would be referred to as transponder X upper or transponder x lower. Here is a link to what is claimed to be the channel mapping for 4DTV SBS 6: Hope it helps.
http://home.austin.rr.com/drlev/b6.htm

[AntAltMike]

That chart shows the actual, intermediate frequencies of the SBS-6 transponders after they have been block-downconverted, but that is not the channel plan that 4DTV employs on its satellite defined as SBS-6. That chart shows Transponder 6 to have an intermediate frequency of 1098 Mz, which is consistent with its actual frequency of 11,848 Mz, but the 4DTV receiver can only tune that transmission by selecting transponder 18.

I connected a splitter to my Ku feed, and selected each of the nineteen available transponder numbers on the 4DTV receiver and then "fine tuned" the frequency from +20 Mz to -20 Mz on each and noted what I found for programming, and then I swept through the intermediate frequency band (950 Mz - 1,450 Mz) using a commercial Pico 3200 and found a few higher frequency transponders that the 4DTV could not reach.