I'm finding lots of challenges with FTA. That's why I'm having fun! If you take a rookie, throw him at a new field with lots of technical jargon and many concepts to understand, mix in equipment failures with manuals that are brief (to be polite), you have a recipe for trouble.
The Sonicview SV-360 Elite PVR receiver is a great receiver with many fine features. I like its 16 different channel simultaneous display capability. It's like sitting in Mission Control determining which of 16 channels to venture into. But I'm finding its firmware has bugs. Some are significant. A bug may have been responsible for the difficulty I had with USALS, since the receiver used to lock requiring a complete reboot when I tried to use that feature. I thought I was doing something wrong. After updating my receiver firmware from the official Sonicview site, the most serious bug is that after about 5 changes of channels, the receiver would lock up and remain indefinitely on the current channel. A helpful "Please update the newest SW" message would be pasted across the screen each time you tried to change the channel. At this stage, the receiver is useless unless you want to watch Bulgarian soap operas (Bulgarian National TV) or oil gushing (MSNBC) 24 hours / day on Telstar 12 (15 W). Sonicview Technical Support admitted on the phone to me that they are trying to get new tested firmware published on their site by this Friday to solve this known problem. In the meantime, I found a beta version firmware image on an FTA forum, tried it and it solved the channel lockup! I'm back in business finding new problems to solve. I had to go through a few firmware versions before I could find one that didn't exhibit the channel locking problem. Moral: If the receiver doesn't work, it may be broken. Don't look to the manufacturer; look to other users on forums and you may find a solution. Lastest success: using the sun while it was precisely at my local high point (sun's maximum day's elevation), I was yesterday able to precisely use a stick's shadow to point exactly at north and allow accurate pointing of the dish to due south. This is much easier than using a compass. The program that I used was Satellite Antenna Alignment (http://www.al-soft.com/http://www.al-soft.com/); a very helpful tool. Latest interesting find: TPAI on Telstar 12. This is Angolan national TV in Portuguese showing interesting scenes and interviews with people in capital Luanda where I spent about a week in 2004. I don't understand the language, but it beats Homer Simpson, which I similarly don't understand why it's popular. Murray
