Hi.

I was surprised to find last Saturday and Sunday evening (29-30/7) that at around 9PM, my receiver reported "No Signal" (Signal Quality = 0%) for all of the channels on the 12326H transponder on PAS8 (carrier signal was strong). This transponder carries the Movie Network channels, etc. All the other Select TV transponders were working just fine as was Syria TV, Ishtar and Noursat. The Select TV promo channel was working fine and made no mention of "technical difficulties" or the like. I attempted a manual search and a manual "network" search (SR=28800) all to no avail.

This condition lasted for at least 3 hours on both evenings until I went to bed and persisted for a while on Sunday during the day as well.

BTW, the channels are all working fine now.

Anyone else see this? I have seen it before and it has always been with the 12326H transponder on PAS8. Weather was fine on the evenings in question in Melbourne.

Select TV informed me of no anomalies on the evenings in question so I must suspect my equipment. I know my receiver is good which only leaves my old Hills LNB but that does not explain the strong carrier signal still in evidence on 12326H or the fact that all other Ku channels (Select TV or otherwise) were working just fine on the evenings in question.

I hope this issue has not been raised elsewhere on the forums as a quick search did not find anything so maybe my setup is really at fault.

Does anyone have an opinion on Select TV's viability?

Cheers.
the Tink.

I just signed up seems great.
Premium picture quality(Even with my Dreamax ebay box).

65cm 2nd hand dish getting 75% signal strength from melbourne

I didn't experience any problems last weekend with the movie channels, but can't say for sure if I was watching around that time.

The only issue was once where there were minor lip synch problems. After I switched from Austar, I'd say the movie channels quality is the same, if not better. CNN seems a little blurred by comparison, but it's only a news channel. Earlier in June there was some pixelation on Natgeo and VH1/MTV, but that seems to have been resolved.

If the WIN deal goes through, that'll give them cash to add another 10 channels and advertise more, and I'd say Selectv would be viable for at least another couple of years provided they can meet their subscriber growth targets.

FROM HORST IN WOLLONGONG
IT IS POSSIBLE,THE SIGNAL WAS A BIT LOWER THAN NORMAL,
BUT DID NOT BREAK UP AT MY PLACE.
I SUGGEST THAT YOU BUY A NEW LNBF,AND ALSO CHECK YOUR DISH.
I NOW IT WILL WORK WITH 65CM BUT I FOUND A 85CM DISH WIL NOT
LOOSE SIGNAL.
I HAVE CARRIED OUT TESTS WITH DISHES.
(USING 6 DISHES AND RECEIVERS INCL.A 2.2 METER)
HSTRECKE@BIGPOND.NET.AU
HAVE A GOOD DAY

OK. Thanks for all your help.

It sounds like a replacement LNBF is the order of the day.
Yes, the pixelation is much less noticeable now. E! was terrible in June and all the red carpet camera flashes just exacerbated the problem. Me thinks too much compression.

Anyway, hope they survive and offer more variety too.

the Tink.

I just checked our teleport logs and ther were no issues on the nights you mention. You could be sufferng a local terrestrial interference problem - any radars, police or otherwise around? are you near a commercial aircraft flightpath?

Hi SelecTV.

Thanks for taking time to reply. I guess your logs suggest that my setup has some sort of intermittent fault. It's a strange fault to say the least.

I'm almost suspecting the smartcard now based on past experiences. I noticed that the EMM and ECM codes in the Toppy Irdeto Card Status screen tend to change rapidly over a short period of time on occasions.

I know they do change periodically, but my Duna card seemed more stable in this regard. I have no idea whether this is normal behaviour and I have re-inserted the Select card to no avail.
When I get authorisation, everything works just fine without interruption or loss of signal.

Yes, I do have commercial aircraft in the vicinity but they are quite a distance away (10km to Tulla) and the outage lasted for several hours. I've never had any TI problems in the past and my C-band setup (2.5m solid) never has any problems aimed at Asiasat2 which coincides with the Southern approach to Tulla but the aircraft would be much lower than the line-of-sight to this satellite. Also, being the evening, aircraft traffic is much reduced in my area.

I never have problems watching OPTUS B3 with an 85cm dish which was working fine on the night in question.

I guess TI and it's harmonics are frequency selective and this may explain why only one transponder was affected on the night in question but the elevation to PAS8 is too great for this effect (I'm located half way down the Tullamarine Freeway gully) and I am not aware of any microwave links in the area. It's not a great vantage point for radio repeaters of any sort really and there are definitely no cellular repeater towers of any sort that I have seen.
I have some experience in RFI identification (been a licensed ham for 23 years and a sat/TVDX enthusiast for nearly 20 years and the effect seems to be either downlink or reception equipment failure.

On an unrelated note, I am curious to know why the Bloomberg channel seems to authorise the other English channels much faster than just switching on the receiver on say BBC. Sometimes, it takes MINUTES for authorisation to occur from power on (I always leave the receiver in standby mode) unless I go to Bloomberg first. Funny effect that. I never had this problem with my Duna TV Irdeto card in the same receiver...it always just fired up in a few seconds.

Sorry for the long reply!

Cheers.
the Tink.

Tinker... I hafe the same issue. Especially overnight.. the first thing in the morning, I notice it takes ages to authenticate.. between 30 & 60 seconds

I'm guessing that you are using some strange brew CA solution. We change our control words multiple times per minute and our keys are changed mutiple times per day. Your STB must be processing EMMs to see the key changes. It's possible that this processing stops during standby (it's not suppose to) and you have to wait to aquire the most recent keys when the box is turned back on. There would normaly be a significant number of key changes overnight.

So far (fingers crossed), we have not struck a bad smart card - the Irdeto folk have done very well to date. So, whilst it's not impossible that the smart card is bad, it seem very unlikely.

I lived in Hong Kong for many years, and when the new airport opened, we found ourselves ocasionally under the flight path (in Clearwater Bay), the aircraft's downward facing terrain clearance radar would kill our STAR TV reception on a frustratingly regular basis. STAR TV had its head office on the harbour and the incomming ships would wipe out reception as they steamed past. On an analogue signal, this is just some sparkles, on digital it wipes out an entire GOP.

Your issue sseems much more likely to be CA related.

I have no explaination for the Bloomberg effect (cue "Twilight Zone" theme music) ??????

Hello again.

SelecTV said:
>I'm guessing that you are using some strange brew CA solution.

Hmmm, what's strange about inserting a genuine SelecTV smartcard into the card slot of a one year old Topfield TF3200IR receiver? Please explain? I gather you are suggesting that Topfield has some strange implementation of Irdeto CA. I doubt that very much and others have reported slow authorisation.

Look, it's not a big deal and I have found a workaround to this issue. I was more concerned about protracted LOS on the 12326H transponder on the dates mentioned and needed verification of my equipment as the symptoms did not suggest local equipment failure.

My Duna TV card has always worked quickly and correctly in this same receiver.
The loss of signal originally reported at the commencement of this thread is definitely NOT due to external interference of any kind. I am reluctant to accept that it may be my LNBF which I will replace in due course. BTW, everything has been working fine without any system changes effected. 99% of the time SelecTV just works.

Thanks again for your assistance and sorry for the excess bandwidth on this forum.

Cheers.
the Tink.

Didn't mean to offend. Just that there are wierd and wonderful CA soultions discussed in these forum, most of which I want to stay well clear of.

SelecTV has an engineering department of three people, we can't support every variation of softcel / frecam / whatever out there. We know that early versions of SoftCel do not behave well with the new Epsilon cards (we test with SoftCel 2.21). We use an Irdeto PiSys CA system which allows us to have frequent key changes and short crypto periods. Duna TV may use the more common Irdeto MCrypt system that is simpler - it has a monthly key change only - this could explain the apparant slowness to authenticate (Duna TV's keys do not change overnight while SelecTV's do). The best solution is not to turn the STB off at night - allow it to continue processing key changes (the stb should continue processing ECMs and EMMs in standby, but your Toppy doesn't seem to??)

I've looked up the teleport logs, asked the engineers and talked to the call centre operators, you are the only person to report an outage.

We have seen some older LNBs that are less sensitive at some transponders than other causing partial rain fade symptoms. This may be worth pursuing.

A lot of boxes today will not update the keys on standby, Even the faithful nokias 9200, and 9500 won't do it. Once you put the box on standby it shuts off the cam so no keys are updated but when the box is turned back on it might take a minute or up to 30 before your box is hit and your pictures re-appear. I turn my box off at night because some run to hot and are a fire hazard in summer.

When my XSAT CDTV 430 is in standby there's no power to the LNBF, so it doesn't matter what the rest of the box is or isn't doing. As expected, there's a delay before getting pictures if it's been on standby for any length of time.

On the other hand, when my UEC DSD 720iF is in standby the LNBF is still powered and the box is still quite warm, suggesting that not much gets shut down. And as expected, if I have my SelecTV card in it instead of my XSAT, pictures are instantaneous when it's taken from standby to "on".

Hi SelecTV.

Many thanks for taking the time to check your logs. I did not expect so much effort to be expended on this. I can imagine the myriad technical challenges you are faced with on a daily basis when starting a new pay television service.

I will definitely change my LNBF before too long.

Yes, I am surprised about my receiver not processing key changes while in standby mode. It's no big deal and I do like to conserve energy so always "standby" my gear at night.
I am sure that many people place their receivers into "standby" mode when retiring for the evening.

I am surprised that you change keys so often. I thought that Irdeto2 encryption is almost impossible to crack? The effect you describe would certainly explain why Duna loads so quickly. You would think the Duna service would be even more conservative considering the cost of their single channel service and relatively small target audience.

Are the frequent key changes really necessary? Obviously your system is more secure and I can appreciate that, but the "feel" of the service would be improved if people experienced "instant on" when powering up instead of bold red "waiting for authorisation" type messages to clear for 60 seconds (me).

I would be quite displeased if I experienced (never have) a 30 minute wait for authorisation as poster "jaremt" mentioned in his posting.

Apologies for the late reply but I do not read this forum every day.

Thanks to all for your valued input.

Cheers.
the Tink.

tinker,

I would say the reason why Irdeto2 V5 is almost impossible to crack is due to the constant key changes.

Yes, Liski is correct about the key changes.

This is one of the features that makes Irdeto 2 so secure. Irdeto has two models of CA system, MCrypt and PiSys. MCrypt is good for about 100k subs and changes keys monthly, but is inexpensive to diploy and maintain. PiSys is good for more than 1m subs, has multiple key changes per day and can support Simulcypt (and cost about 5x as much as MCrypt to deploy and support) - we use this.

We also use the Epsilon card which has card sharing countermeasures and the ability to download new code to the card. We have done pour best to make a secure CA environment.

So.... no, sorry, but we will continue to cycle keys muultiple times per day - given the gold cards and MDS hacks of the past, we will not compromise on security.

One of our primary assumptions is that your IRD will continue to process ECMs during standby (the SelecTV STB does this) - this is typical of newer IRDs - there is even a feature in the CA to start a download when the STB goes to standby. In your case, your will need to keep your IRD powerd up to avoid the authorisation delay.

I'm always interested to hear of potential failures - we have one or two people working in the teleport - they can't see every problem - some of our best informaton about problems comes from the field.