TechniSat SkyStar S2

TechniSat SkyStar S2 Card

A FTA PCI DVB-S2 card from TechniSat.

Components Used

• PCI Bridge: FlexCop II B
• Demodulator: CX24120-13Z
• Tuner: CX24118A
• LNB: ISL6421

The CX24118A Tuner supports QPSK, 8PSK Modulation.

Drivers

There is a patch for the s2-liplianin driver that adds support for the SkyStar S2. Instructions (german) can be found here: ([1])

The patch can be extracted from the file and applied directly to the mainline linux source. Works pretty well then.

No support for 8PSK 3/4. To support the need to replace the crystal oscillator of 45 MHz to 66,667 MHz

[Update 2014/04/22]

With the latest patch / driver everything is working fine. Also for 8PSK 3/4 no hardware upgrade is needed.

[Update 2014/12/04]

Spoke too soon, some 8PSK 3/4 transponders are working. Tested more and e.g. 23.5E 12207 V 27500 5/6 isn't working.

The driver from Custler with latest adaption for 3.10 - 3.13 by Ducky ([2])

Compiling on Debian

Modify as root /etc/sources.list, adding non-free and backports:

deb http://ftp.es.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main non-free
deb-src http://ftp.es.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main non-free
deb http://ftp.es.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main
deb-src http://ftp.es.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main

Install (as root) last kernel and firmwares

apt-get update
apt-get install firmware-linux
apt-get install linux-image-3.14-0.bpo.1-686-pae
reboot

As regular user, download sources for the installed kernel

mkdir src
cd src
apt-get source linux-image-3.14-0.bpo.1-686-pae

Make a symlink to help next patching

ln -s linux-3.14.4/ linux

Copy the patch 31_S2_CX24120_SYS_DVBS.patch to the current path and apply it

patch -p1 < 31_S2_CX24120_SYS_DVBS.patch

Get into the directory with the kernel source

cd linux

Configure and compile. You have two choices

• 1) Only needed kernel-modules

make oldconfig
make SUBDIRS=drivers/media modules

• 2) All the kernel. Take a coffee...

make oldconfig
make

Backup the old modules for the card (just in case...)

cp /lib/modules/3.14-0.bpo.1-686-pae/kernel/drivers/media/common/b2c2/b2c2-flexcop.ko /lib/modules/3.14-0.bpo.1-686-pae/kernel/drivers/media/common/b2c2/b2c2-flexcop.ko.bak
cp /lib/modules/3.14-0.bpo.1-686-pae/kernel/drivers/media/pci/b2c2/b2c2-flexcop-pci.ko /lib/modules/3.14-0.bpo.1-686-pae/kernel/drivers/media/pci/b2c2/b2c2-flexcop-pci.ko.bak

Copy (as root) your recently-compiled modules to the correct path

cd drivers/media/
cp pci/b2c2/b2c2-flexcop-pci.ko /lib/modules/3.14-0.bpo.1-686-pae/kernel/drivers/media/pci/b2c2/b2c2-flexcop-pci.ko
cp common/b2c2/b2c2-flexcop.ko /lib/modules/3.14-0.bpo.1-686-pae/kernel/drivers/media/common/b2c2/b2c2-flexcop.ko
cp dvb-frontends/cx24120.ko /lib/modules/3.14-0.bpo.1-686-pae/kernel/drivers/media/dvb-frontends/

Update module dependencies (as root):

cd /lib/modules/3.14-0.bpo.1-686-pae
depmod

Get (as regular user) the firmware from here, decompress

tar jxvf dvb-fe-cx24120-1.20.58.2.fw.tar.bz2

and copy it (as root) to the correct place

cp dvb-fe-cx24120-1.20.58.2.fw /lib/firmware/

Successfully tested on 2014 June on Debian Wheezy.

Page Allocation Failure

Some systems see occasional page allocation problems on module reload/init (even on systems with 1GB of ram). The following command may help:

echo 16384 > /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes

Source : ([3],[4])

External Links

• TechniSat SkyStar S2 product page

• patched driver from Custler for cx24120

• driver patch for kernel 3.10 - 3.13, this patch includes support for DVBS and DVBS2

• firmware