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Sundtek SkyTV Ultimate VIII

Commandline Tune commands

DVB-S/S2/S2X Tuning

Sundtek SkyTV 8 Dual

Raspberry PI

We have done this experiment since a few customers were asking us about how the tuner is working on the Raspberry PI 4. Technically there's no problem on supporting the tuner as long as you pick the correct parts, practically there might be variations due to different power supplies (watch your power supply), a cellphone charger or USB output of a router is definitely insufficient (customers who contacted us were trying to power it from those sources as well).

General Information about the power consumption of a Raspberry PI 4, please note even though power supplies might be recommended by the Raspberry PI foundation those power supplies might be only considered for the raspberry PI itself but not for powering additional devices, we'll try to cover some more information about that here.

In general the Raspberry PI 3 seems to be more easy going about the power supply.

For our tests we used: 2020-08-20-raspios-buster-armhf-full.img

Power consumption, we have used a Rigol DP832A for measuring the power consumption.

Without SD Card: 0.5A at 5V (2.5W)

With SD Card + UI + playing 720p video around 800mA (peak)

With SD Card + UI + playing 720p + USB Driver installed (and scanning for frequencies) 1.2A and wifi enbled (peak). at this point it is very important that the Raspberry PI is picky about the power supply - the RPI foundation recommends 5.1V the .1V make a significant difference when it's about undervoltage. We were running the PSU at 5.1V and the Raspberry PI reported undervoltage when connecting the device - so here connect the device before booting up the Raspberry PI (or power external USB devices through a separate 5V power supply).

Troubleshooting

If you need any help feel free to contact us, we strongly recommend to give us some remote access for checking issues - since this is usually the fastest way. We know our devices - but we don't know the users environment so we also have to dig into the problem to find an appropriate solution.
We try to document issues that have happened to some customers in the past.
Please be patient if you have issues - we'll try to help as good as we can.

Device is disconnecting

you might have to check which ID the USB device has and disable autosuspend.

echo on > /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-5/power/control

please note the device is certainly not 1-5 on your system

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/usb/power-management.txt

power/control

This file contains one of two words: "on" or "auto".

You can write those words to the file to change the

device's setting.

"on" means that the device should be resumed and

autosuspend is not allowed. (Of course, system

suspends are still allowed.)

"auto" is the normal state in which the kernel is

allowed to autosuspend and autoresume the device.

(In kernels up to 2.6.32, you could also specify

"suspend", meaning that the device should remain

suspended and autoresume was not allowed. This

setting is no longer supported.)

Corrupted video

Normally you should not run into those issues, but since Linux is opensource and can be used with so many devices it also opens the possibility for some configuration mismatches.

Some customers used the device with a Raspberry PI, please note that the Dual DVB-S/S2/S2X regularly draws around 300-450mA at 5V (only for powering the chipsets). The 12V powersupply's task is it to provide power for the LNB Circuit on the board for powering the LNB with 13/18V

In order to nail down a power issue you can tune to a channel and watch the signal statistics.

For example on Astra 19.2 Sat1

sudo -s # to switch to root

/opt/bin/mediaclient --shutdown

/opt/bin/mediaclient --start

--- BEGIN ---

# wait a few seconds and check if the device shows up using following command:

/opt/bin/mediaclient -e

afterwards tune to a transponder:

/opt/bin/mediaclient -m DVBS -f 12545000 -M QPSK -S 22000000 -E 5/6 -V H -d /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0

afterwards check the signal strength:

/opt/bin/mediaclient --readsignal=0 -d /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0

at this stage only the first tuner is active and the tuner will draw less power than 300-450mA

you can also use mplayer to verify the stream quality

/opt/bin/mediaclient --cat /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 | mplayer -cache 10240 -ao null -vo null -benchmark -nosound -

there shouldn't be any messages about stream corruptions.

afterwards open a second terminal and go back to "BEGIN" and run all commands again but with adapter1 instead of adapter0

No corruptions should show up.

Also try to swap the cables and check and compare this signal strength (that way you can even sort out if you have a bad cable).

If you see the signal going down on both tuners that means that the Raspberry PI doesn't have enough power, a 5V 2Ampere powersupply is definitely not enough.