USB tuner: Some like it hot..

[drewg]

I have a USB tuner that I really like (Kworld UB435-Q v1). After rebooting my server for the first time in ~9 months, it was no longer recognized. After some experimentation, I found that on some machines, it is just plain not recognized, and on others it is attaching at USB 1.1 (12Mb/s) speed, rather than USB 2.0 (480Mb/s), and so does not function properly.

Figuring that I had nothing to loose, I set it on a hot radiator, left it for a few minutes, and then tried plugging it in after it was hot to the touch. Success! It worked again. The odd thing was that after it had negotiated the speed, it seemed to keep working, even after it cooled off.

I'm assuming there is some connection that has broken, and heating it up temporarily fixes it... Everything is so small that it is hard to visually detect any problem. I was hoping for something obvious, like the USB connector was poorly soldered..

So now I need to find a new low-power LG3305 based USB or PCIe tuner that works on linux.

Drew