I’ve got a WinTV DVB card set up to scan the skies using a satellite dish from A Well-Known DTH Satellite Provider left over from the previous residents (wow, that’s a mouthful). Tuning the card has proved problematic as I’ve never been able to switch satellites cleanly. Instead, I’ve had to switch polarity a few times before the card would lock on to a channel.
Borrowing a ladder, I hiked up to the dish, took a look, and with the help of the Internets figured out the problem. It seems the DTH Provider’s equipment wasn’t initially designed to work multiple satellties. The switch used to change satellites was a proprietary hack to get the dumb equipment working with multiple “birds.” Because its proprietary, my DVB card doesn’t know how to talk to it.
I could wire both LNBFs up down to the garage and switch manually if I wanted, or I can wait for a new DiSEqC switch gets here next week. After that, its on to buying more dishes and increasing the number of channels I can view!
(For a primer on all this mumbo-jumbo, I recommend a visit to the FTAList website.)