Background: My old setup
Nokia 9600 + Echostar LT8700 + 3 dishes...
My old setup (now superseded by a Dreambox receiver) had an EchoStar LT8700 analog receiver connected to a Nokia MediaMaster 9600 digital receiver running DVB2000, connected to three dishes: a 1.0 metre motorized dish with one LNB, a 0.9 metre fixed dish with two LNBs (Astra at 19.2 East and Hotbird at 13 East), and a silly little oval dish for Astra and Eurobird at 28 East. An outdoor DiSeqC switch switches one feed cable between the 4 LNBs, and an indoor priority switch switches that signal between the analog and digital receivers using the 0/12 volt output from the Nokia. The LT8700 can't send DiSeqC commands, but it reliably selects DiSeqC input 1 every time - so the analog box can only connect to the motorized dish.
At least 26 different satellite positions are available with this setup, so I thought it would be useful to have a few utilities to assist with the task of maintaining the channel lists in my receivers from the information sources on the web. This is possible because both receivers have RS232 serial ports: this is standard on the Nokia, while a serial port for the LT8700 can be bought from www.setedit.de along with the LTEDIT program.
An added complication of my setup is that the Nokia channel list must be set up to know the satellite numbers in the EchoStar, so that the Nokia can tell the EchoStar when it wants the motorized dish to move: DVB2000 has a specific feature for commanding an LT8700 by connecting the serial ports of the two receivers together.
9600 + LT8700 - Is it the way to go?
On balance, perhaps not! While the Nokia 9600 and the Echostar LT8700 are fine receivers, the 8700 is pretty buggy when setting up the satellites and channels (at least with V4.1 firmware) which is a big waste of time. Since you can now buy an Echostar AD3000IP for less than 400 UK Pounds, this combination of receivers may not make sense if you're starting from scratch. If you can live without analog but you want to go motorised, then a Nokia 9600 with DVB2000 ought to work well with a DiSeqC positioner (though some DiSeqC positioners have problems due to the limited drive power from the LNB cable). It is easier to set up a motorised system if you have an analogue receiver, but 20 quid buys you an old Sky analogue box for this purpose.
Do you really need motorised anyway? A dual-feed Astra1/Hotbird dish can receive hundreds of digital channels. There is also a new special dish (Wavefrontier Toroidal 90) that lets you fit lots of LNBs at arbitrary positions. But a big motorised dish is probably best for Feed Hunting: looking for feeds from outside broadcast trucks covering news reports, sports events etc.
On the positive side for the LT8700, the "Calculate Satellite Position" graph display in LTEDIT is excellent, and is ideal if you want to try to find a weak feed satellite. The LT8700 also runs cooler than any other satellite box I've used. It has a good D2MAC decoder built in, but D2MAC is almost totally dead now, - and DVB offers better quality.
The Nokia 9600 with DVB2000 is very flexible - people tell me it's a lot more flexible than many other digital receivers. It certainly seems quite capable for feed hunting. However, it's getting pretty old now, and firmware updates will be hard to come by. This could be a nuisance if broadcasters start sending data that the box can't handle.
See Also
Other pages on my site:-