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TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 09-10/2012
— www.TELE-satellite.com
that the receiver’s internal
time jumps back and forth an
hour or two. Thankfully, there
is a time server (NTP – Net-
work Time Protocol) already
pre-set in the AZBox miniMe:
time.tu-berlin.de.
Now we‘re only one step
away from actually watching
TV with the AZBox miniMe,
and this final step deals with
getting the receiver to work
with the reception equipment
in place.
Just so you know, all DiS-
EqC protocols are supported.
We began with connecting
the box to our existing array
of antennas, which consists
of four flat antennas aligned
to the following positions:
DiSEqC-1 - ASTRA 1
(19.2E), DiSEqC-2 - HOTBIRD
(13.0E), DiSEqC-3 - HISPA-
SAT (30.0W) and DiSEqC-4
- ASTRA 2 (28.2E).
For that configuration to
work you don’t even need to
consult the manual, since all
OSD menus are self-explan-
atory.
We then initiated a chan-
nel search across all four
positions, which had us wait-
ing for a total of 34 minutes.
While this is a tad on the long
side, we were rewarded with
3178 channels, which is quite
an impressive result for a
standard search with 60cm
flat antennas in bad weather.
Speaking of the channel
search, the AZBox miniMe
comes with a tuner that is
capable of performing blind
scan searches, just like the
larger AZBox ME. The current
AZtrino firmware supports
blind scan as well, which is
why we couldn’t refrain from
hooking up our 2.4m mesh
antenna with C band LNB for
a blind scan search on 37.5W.
The AZBox miniMe flaw-
lessly detected a number of
transponders as well as the
Metro TV channel from Gha-
na. This signal is broadcast
with a symbol rate of 1674
and an FEC of 7/8. While the
resolution of only a quarter of
PAL standard is very unusual
and feels like an insult to the
eyes – especially when com-
pared to all the latest FTA HD
channels on ASTRA 1 (19.2E)
– it is truly exciting to be able
to watch African TV in Eu-
rope. All DXers out there will
surely understand what we
mean!
The only thing that was not
met with our approval was
the wrong indication of the
transponders’ frequencies:
The figures given were based
on a universal LNB, even