I have a nexus-s satellite card and am running Ubuntu edgy eft. The card works fine. I can zap to FTA channels using szap using an old incomplete channels.conf I had.

I'm trying to create a new channels.conf for echostar 7 at 119w so that I can use vdr to change channels instead of szap.

I trie running the scan that comes with dvbutils, dvbscan from Thoraz but they both create channels.conf files that don't work. They are incomplete or have the wrong frequencies. Eg, I've tried

./dvbscan -G -lDBS -o vdr -e 3 -s 1 -x 0 -p dvb-s/echostar-119w > channels.conf.119w

For the NASA channel it shows the frequency as 12369 but it should be at 12370. So I manually changed it to 12370. I then ran vdr and changed to NASA but I get a blank screen. Does anyone know why that could happen?

the line in /etc/vdr/channels.conf is

NASA:12370:v:S119.0W:20000:4130:4131:0:0:213:4100:11:10000

the .conf file for szap shows nasa as:

NASA:12370:v:1:20000:4130:4131:213

I'm not sure how I got this .conf file but it works for szap.

Questions:

1. does scan or dvbscan work for N.A. satellites?

2. I've read about an nscan. Does that one work?

3. How do you get a valid channels.conf file for N.A. sats?

With dvbscan I find that it can't tune to some transponders that are supposed to be on the satellite, or records the wrong frequency in channels.conf and gives incomplete results (maybe because it can't tune to a transponder).

thanks, Bob