Nova S2 HD issues

[keefb]

I've added a DVB-S2 card to my system. I run V6.6 on WHS with an HD200 as the client. I use a 5400 rpm Hitachi Deskstar disk outside the server pool for recordings. I can receive all the UK Freesat channels & watch them OK for a while. Usually 20-30 mins. I then get micro-stutters & what look a bit like MPEG artefacts for a short while then it's all back to normal & will remain so for another 20-30 mins.

I'm hunting around in the dark here. I can't isolate reception problems from PC problems. Sage reports the signal strength at 94% on all the major Freesat channels, both SD & HD. I have peaked up the antenna using a an analogue signal strenth meter but I don't know if the cross-pol is optimised. I've set the skew angle as suggested for my location, London, which is roughly beam-centre for Astra 28.2E

Does anyone know if it's possible to extract BER from the Nova S2-HD card? If so, what do I need?

Is there any way of monitoring what the HDD is doing? I get the problem on both SD & HD so I'm not convinced it's a throughput problem. I also see the same problem whether I'm watching live or a recording. No other recordings in progress either

I also have a Dual Nova T DVB-T card installed & that always works fine.

Any (polite) suggestions would be much appreciated.

[starfire]

One suggestion, try using some other software to watch DVB-S and see if you hit the same issue? - just try to narrow down what may be at fault.

[keefb]

Starfire,

I thought that as well, so I tried to use Hauppauge's WinTV7, but it won't work over RDP to my headless WHS box. I'll put a monitor on it, & see what it does.

I'd still like to get a measure of the BER, though, to see it's borderline & overwhelming the FEC momentarily.

[starfire]

Originally Posted by keefb

I'd still like to get a measure of the BER, though, to see it's borderline & overwhelming the FEC momentarily.

Don't know how to measure those on Windows, only other s/w I have used is ProgDVB and Prog Finder which give an indication of quality/strength but not BER AFAIK.

[paulie]

Try a faster hard disc.

[keefb]

All very well saying that, but unless or until I can find some way of determining whether the disk is the problem, I don't see much point. Poke & hope is not the way to do this.

[MCE-Refugee]

I would suspect given the regular frequency of the problem that a process on WHS is waking up & running & interfering with the tuner although perhaps not as you do have a DVB-T tuner working OK.

Alternatively interference with the satellite signal may be the cause. Do you have a regular satellite receiver that you can connect to the feed & check?

[doc]

After moving drives around my system a few months ago I started to get micro-stuttering and I'd forgot to format the drives with 64k blocks. Once I reformatted all went back to normal.

[brewston]

To eliminate the drive as a possible cause, you could benchmark it with iometer (Stop Sage first) and you could also use HDtune to pull the SMART data from the drive, but if the drive was too slow then I'd expect the problem to be constant.

I agree with MCE-Refugee though, if the problem is regular & cyclic then I'd suspect something host initiated.

[keefb]

Thanks for the updates. I have made some progress but no nearer a solution.

I think I can eliminate the drive for the moment. It's a 7200 rpm drive on its own PCIE 1 controller & it's not in the WHS pool. The same drive is used by both DVB-T & DVb-S2 cards, but the problem is only with the satellite card,

I got Hauppauge's WINTV 7 to co-operate & it appears to record programs without the stutter. I watched the WINTV 7 .ts file on the HD200 which was recored on the same drive that Sage uses. Unfortunately, I don't have another satellite receiver to compare signal quality with.

When either watching live or watching a Sage recording the problem seems to occur about 20 mins after starting. The picture breaks up & there appears to be what looks like a small jump. It's almost as though a buffer is running out & then resetting. There is a small amount of subsequent error, which looks a bit like poor BER, but it then all recovers.

There are no system messages. This behaviour happens on both SD & HD transmissions watched off the S2-HD card, but not off the DVB-T dual HD Nova card. I upgraded the S2 card driver to the latest version as well, but the problem still exists.

I think I will raise the issue with support.