[linux-dvb] Re: Full featured DVB-T card update

[Ragnar Sundblad <ragge@nada.kth.se>]

--On den 3 augusti 2003 22:04 +0000 Juergen Peitz <peitz@snafu.de> wrote:

> Hi,
> maybe I found a solution for the lock-up problem. Because of the last
> very hot   days here in Berlin my card also started to show this
> lock-up's more often.  So it really seems to be heat depending.
> I installed a fan close to it and I already got less lock-up's. Then I
> found  out that some channels became disturbed by the fan. So it's also
> important  that the card is not disturbed by other electric devices.
This sounds like one of the problems I had - with a fan that was
fed from a 12V connector on the main board. When moved away to a
hard drive connector of its own things suddenly started to work
much better. I also tried with an extra pci card which I soldered
capacitors to the 12V on - this seemed to help until I bought a
new power supply.

This is why I keep saying that people may find problems by checking
that their 12V is clean, stable and high (in my case not less than
11,9 V), and I guess both the power supply as well as the main board
design is if high relevance here.

I have attached a heat sink onto my SP8870. When I think about it,
that was probably one of those things that made things work better
in my case too. I have done to much with this setup - I don't know
what change did what improvement anymore.

> Next I did some more debugging on the driver. I couldn't find a way to
> avoid  the hangups of the sp8870 firmware, but probably found a solution
> to let the  driver detect it and recover from it (see Patch).
> With this patch my card now seems to run absolutly stable even without a
> fan.  (though it's probably better for the card to install one).
Thanks a lot! I can't try it right now, but will in a few days.

But wouldn't just a tune to a frequency without a signal be
interpreted as a lockup in this code? Maybe the dprintks
should be altered to say something more like

dprintk("%s: firmware lockup (or no signal on frequency)!\n", __FUNCTION__);

just to avoid confusion. When I started to try to get my system to
work I had so many problems and variables that it was really hard
to understand what was happening and why (and to make things even
worse, as soon as I almost got it recieving something the frequency
bending started to retune which of course made the signal disappear :-)
When I found out that this was happening, I disabled the bending).

/ragge




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