I have a sagem dbox that has the sportster image in it. The Setanta sports channels, Sky movies 3-8 and some other channels freeze up and stutter or it says channel unavailable and displays a black screen. Any help would be mega appreciated as its a right pain in the ass not being able to watch movies or the Scottish Premier League games on Setanta. Ive been told that the length of the cable feeding the box from where the feed comes into the house can affect this. Mine is about 12 meters long. Can the length affect the channels or is this just a load of nonsense. The FTA channels all work perfectly all the time. PLease help as the box is going to end up with a short, sharp visit from Mr Hatchet soon......
The length of cable can affect signal but 12 metres isn't excessive if it's good quality and not the crap brown stuff from B&Q. Try a different EMU, I find MGCAMD works better for me. Remove the modem as that's known to cause stuttering problems. Check UUCODES are set to 001. Check there are no bad connections on your cable and that the cable is not coiled up anywhere as that kills RF signals. Go into extras settings and turn off any extra info bar items like decoding info, signal level etc. Also try a rescan setting your bouquets to update only in case it is a tuning issue.
I replaced the cable with some good 75 ohm coaxial cable. Before i routed the cable i attached the connectors and ran it across the floor. PERFECT!!!!!! every single channel works great, no freeze, no stutter. I then routed the cable and guess what? i get the Setanta channels but still no movies. Ive just actually noticed that the coaxial cable is running along beside and under a 240v mains feed. I think that this will be causing the problem too. Thanks for the advice fekker mate, it was invaluable. For anyone else out there having the same problems, get new decent 75 coaxial cable and make sure that its routed well away from 240v power lines.
