Quite unexpectedly, BATC presented the GRANT DIXON AWARD for the most innovative contribution to ham radio ATV….to the DATV-Express Project team. The Project Team is honored and quite proud to have been selected for this award. As Ken W6HHC likes to point out, an interesting point is that none of the project team members have ever met another team member “in person”. All project discussions and efforts are conducted by simple e-mail or SKYPE sessions…..the internet is amazing!
The team made a difficult decision to clean up some bugs on the PC software BEFORE completing the ODROID effort. The team confirmed that the current DATV-Express v2.02 software did not work well on old DVB-S STBs with small buffers. After a few minutes of transmission the PCR timing re-calculations (needed for the old Hauppauge PCR jitter problem) could fall outside the STB buffer capacity, causing the received video to go blank-or-freeze…or causing a “popping” sound on audio. Newer DVB-S receivers with large buffers (like my SatLink) never exhibited this problem. A new draft of v2.03 software debian has been tested and is ready to be posted on our web site. BTW – previous suspicions that SDT and PAT PID default values were causing the HV110 DVB-T receivers to rejects these PIDs values and declare “NO SERVICE” were incorrect. But, we are now waiting for feedback by alpha-testers who had the problem before release. Worst-case, we will begin to publish the new v2.03 software and README on Oct 09. The changes made in v2.03 include:
..* Version 2.03 now can also run on Ubuntu V14.04 LTS 32-bit and 64-bit OS.
..* Solves a PCR timing issue on old STBs with small buffers to freeze/blank video.
..* Solves a software bug in v2.02 that prevented some Hauppauge model PVR-150 units with composite camera video from working correctly.
..* Allow table values for the network_id field and the STREAM field to be user adjustable (the real HiDes HV-110 issue).
Finally, HiDes has updated their HV-110 firmware to eliminate the compatibility issue and DATV-Express v2.03 has been tested with old HV-110 DVB-T receivers to assure that the issue is resolved on older HV-110 units, too.
The ODROID U3 debian package build for general public of DATV-Express turns out to be more difficult to prepare than expected. Charles G4GUO explained that the utility that he uses to build a .deb package, seems to miss a lot of required software installs when the use tries to .deb install on ODROID U3. Each of these “install exceptions” can be performed with good instructions…but a bit error prone. To make matters more complex, Charles purchased an ODROID U3 with the emmc memory option…that is essentially NON-removable. So, Charles can not experience a “new user” environment anymore…because he can not clear all memory and try it again. The solution for the team is that Ken W6HHC will use his ODROID U3 that uses a removable micro-SD memory and can be cleared to start all over again. Ken now has his ODROID U3 up and running and has now practiced doing fresh downloads of ububtu for ODROID on to a cleared micro-SD….or copying a useful “standard” image from one SD to another in order to have spares available if one micro-SD gets “bricked”.
The plans for October is to have Ken to test the draft .deb package builds for ODROID U3 flavor of DATV-Express (for ARM) and start preparing a draft of User Guide focused on ODROID. In our spare time, we will post the v2.03 for PC builds of software and documentation on the web site.
“full speed ahead”….de Ken W6HHC