TTD Forum

Bear with me folks, I am new to all this satellite stuff..

I live in Switzerland and bought a modest FTA receiver, 80 cm dish and universal LNB to get English language channels, in particular BBC and ITV FTA broadcasts on Astra2 at 28.2E.

I then thought it would be useful to have some time-shifting so I bought a Topfield TF5010PVR receiver with 250 GB hard disk. After swapping out the original Technosat receiver for the new Topfield I did a service scan. However, I now find I am missing many of the channels that the Technosat had, for example, ITV 2 and 4, plus most of the film channels.

Thinking I could do a manual search for the missing channels I checked Lyngsat for the details of them on Astra 2D but found that I was unable to enter the frequencies given in the Topfield because I had to accept from a prepared list that incremented in blocks – for example, ITV 2 and ITV 4 are on TP 44 at 10758MHz vertically polarized but the nearest I had to choose was 10773MHz.

As everything is so new to me I am probably not utilizing the equipment properly, but can anyone point me in the right direction to regain the channels I could receive on my simple, cheap little Technosat receiver but now cannot on my expensive, highly sophisticated Topfield system.

Best regards.

Hi Barnacle,

I also live in Switzerland with a similar configuration to yours. The major difference is,
that I own a TPF5000CI. Your receiver should be smarter and the advise I got from Topfield Support should be valid for you too:

I was also missig the same stations. I was able, though, to enter the missing data
(frequency, FEC, polarisation, symbol rate) and do a manual search for each of the
missing transponders. As far I as noticed, all the missing stations are now present.
So far, so good. But I wanted to be certain to keep those stations in case of a receiver
breakdown and called support. They told me, that I coud have done a Network Search.
right from the beginning. It would have taken quite a while, but due to some interconnection of the transponders, I would probably have found all the missing stations.

Unfortunately he was just a tiny bit vague as to whether I would have gotten 100 percent
of the stations but I thought you might try it.

If you are a computer freak you can then download your configuration to it (manipulate it if needed) and reload it. This way you can save your configuration. There are quite a few helpful people in this forum. One has even written a program to do this.
If you are interested, I can direct you to the proper part of the forum. The name of the program ist "TopSET".

Godd Luck!
Leo99

If you speak German as well, you can read here something about the backgrounds of Network Search.

[quote=""Barnacle""]I was unable to enter the frequencies given in the Topfield because I had to accept from a prepared list that incremented in blocks – for example, ITV 2 and ITV 4 are on TP 44 at 10758MHz vertically polarized but the nearest I had to choose was 10773MHz.[/quote]
Have you tried typing in the digits one by one with the number keys on your remote control? On my Topfield this works fine. I am not familiar with the TF5010PVR but I would be surprised if this doesn't work the same way.

[quote=""leo99""]They told me, that I coud have done a Network Search.
right from the beginning. [/quote]

Thanks for that, Leo99, it did the trick. I now have all missing channels (plus others that I didn't have on my original receiver), except for ITV 4. I shall try a separate search for that later when I have a little more time.

This is really a great forum, to get such help so quickly - thanks again.

Best, B.

[quote=""Bonni""]If you speak German as well, you can read here something about the backgrounds of Network Search.[/quote]
Thanks for the link Bonni, I'm learning fast.

Yes, I do have conversational German but my written version makes my Austrian wife smile so I didn't want to be a bad joke here by advertising my grammatical mistakes.

Best, B.

[quote=""Klaus""]Have you tried typing in the digits one by one with the number keys on your remote control? On my Topfield this works fine. I am not familiar with the TF5010PVR but I would be surprised if this doesn't work the same way.[/quote]
Klaus, of course you are right - duh .

I had made the mistake of pressing the "OK" sign next to the "Frequency" input and thereby getting the list of pre-found frequencies, thinking that was all that I could choose. By not pressing "OK" I could indeed dial the exact frequency required with the remote number keys.

Thanks for your help.

Best, B.