Has anyone ever seen this .frq file weirdness?

[jt4242]

I added a new HDHR tuner for OTA and did a SageTV scan and got the results below. 3 very strange lines - the lines that SHOULD be there are pasted below them. The rest of the entries were fine. Needless to say, these 3 don't tune.

Why would this happen? Has anyone ever had anything like this happen?! I have been searching and working on this problem for weeks. So any insight would be massively appreciated!!

CH:2 major:1 minor:2171 prog:1 phy:14 frq:471250000 #:┘
CH:3 major:1 minor:2171 prog:1 phy:14 frq:471250000 #:2171
CH:18 major:1 minor:51 prog:1 phy:49 frq:681250000 #:┘

Those lines bolded lines should be:

CH:2 major:5 minor:1 prog:3 phy:14 frq:471250000 #:WPTZ-HD
CH:3 major:5 minor:2 prog:7 phy:14 frq:471250000 #:CW-METV
CH:18 major:62 minor:1 prog:1 phy:49 frq:681250000 #:CJNT-DT

Thanks!

[BobPhoenix]

Can't say I've ever seen it before but my guess is that you didn't get a clean signal from those stations when you scanned. You could try a scan again and/or at a different time of day to see if it changes. Or change the position of a directional antenna to see if you get a better signal.

[matt91]

Agree with Bob - sounds like a signal strength.

If you open the HDHR GUI and drill down to one of those channels, what are the strength readings?

[jt4242]

Thanks for writing!

HDHR config reports ~92-71-100 for all 3.

This has been a 6 week fight - suddenly I was getting NO SIGNAL (but not consistently) on these channels and I've been trying everything - even bought a new HDHR!

Silicondust concluded after having me send logs that (this is a summary):

Some of the metadata the station is broadcasting is invalid - sending 2 different formats of channel identifying data, one ATSC, and the other DVB. The TVCT is there so anything that doesn't handle DVB just ignores the SDT and continues working, but anything that looks for either will be confused. The SDT shouldn't be present at all in an ATSC broadcast.

They concluded that SageTV was getting confused and thinking it was a DVB channel and also said that it might be a timing issue with either/both too. The TVCT is on a 400ms cycle, while the SDT is on a 60ms cycle. Whichever one happens to get picked up first would be used. Most likely the SDT since it comes more often.

I have been reading everything I could find - I couldn't do anything about the signal being sent but I have been going through logs and other Sage files. I have also been searching back through all my old SageTV installations comparing versions of files to see where they changed (my favorite part about Sage is that one can just transfer a single directory and have a backup - I have far too many stored but, in this instance, it has helped me).

Remapping the odd channels didn't give consistently good results either so, yesterday, I started playing with the .frq files and transferred the contents of an old one that had the correct data above. It seemed to work well so I made the .frq files read only, added .par files for each tuner and have been testing like mad.

CROSSING MY FINGERS - 24 hours later and all still seems to work well so I'm hoping I can finally quit this quest.

Thanks again for responding - but am I the only one this has happened to?

[MattHelm]

I could have sworn someone else here, report something like this, just a while back. But, I've been on so many forums lately, I can't swear to it. Maybe it was on the SD formus??? (I'm getting old, not remember things!)


BTW, why would anyone be using the DVB format here in the US?

[KryptoNyte]

Matt, just between you, me, and the rest of the old guys around this joint, I think he might be from Canada, eh.

[jt4242]

I am indeed from Montreal, Canada but the station in question is NBC from Burlington VT and who knows why they might be using DVB - SiliconDust wrote them but nothing has changed. But in all my reading, I think I've read that satellite signals are DVB or did I misunderstand?? My brain is on overload.

It would have been nice to find another person with the same problem - and I searched long and hard without success. Try searching on gibberish and symbols like ┘ !! Even printing the symbol ┘ for this forum required that I use the ascii keystroke alt-217 because it just showed as a blank when I cut and pasted from the frq file.

30 hours and still a signal at all times..........

[imeric]

Hi jtjt4242,

I played with the frq files but it's partly working... I have 2 PCs with hauppage capture cards and changing the .frq on one of them worked but didn't on the other PC.

I think we may need to change some lines in the sage.properties file as well but haven't got around it yet...(I assume the scan hardware lines in the file need to be "hacked" as well...

Did you do anything else besides modifying your .frq files?
Merci!