ngene & Satix-S2 dual problems

[Robert Longbottom <rongblor@googlemail.com>]

Hi all,

I have a Satix-S2 Dual that I'm trying to get to work properly so that I 
can use it under MythTv however I'm running into a few issues.  I 
previously posted about the problems I'm having here to the mythtv 
list[1], but didn't really get anywhere.  I've had chance to have a bit 
more of a play and I now seem to have a definite repeatable problem.

The problem is when a recording stops on one of the inputs, after about 
40s it causes the other input to loose it's signal lock and stop the 
recording as well.


Steps to demonstrate the problem (My Satix card is adapters 5 and 6)

In 3 seperate terminals set up femon/szap/cat to make a recording from 
one of the inputs:

1 - femon -a 6 -f 0 -H
2 - szap -a 6 -f 0 -d 0 -r -H -p -c scanResult07Oct2010_Satix -l 
UNIVERSAL "BBC 1 London"
3 - cat /dev/dvb/adapter6/dvr0 > ad6.mpg

In 2 seperate terminals tune in the other input:

4 - femon -a 5 -f 0 -H
5 - szap -a 5 -f 0 -d 0 -r -H -p -c scanResult07Oct2010_Satix -l 
UNIVERSAL "ITV1 London"

Both inputs are fine, signal is good, recording from adapter 6 works.

6 - Ctrl-C the szap process created in (5).

femon in (4) still reports status=SCVYL and decent signal strengh as if 
the adapter is still tuned and FE_HAS_LOCK.  After approximately 40 
seconds, either:

a) the signal drops significantly but the status remains at SCVYL and 
FE_HAS_LOCK

or

b) the signal drops and the status goes blank with no lock.

It doesn't seem to matter which of these two happen, but at the same 
time the recording on the other tuner looses it signal and stops 
recording, despite the fact that szap is still running in (2).  femon in 
(1) no longer reports FE_HAS_LOCK.

Strangely if I then try to restart the szap process created in terminal 
2 (to try and retune it) it just waits after printing out "using 
'/dev/dvb/....".  However if I then restart the szap process in terminal 
5, the one in terminal 2 suddenly kicks in and gets a lock.

Interestingly I found a link describing a 60s period the card is kept 
open for [2], which seems to be similar to my ~40s delay.  So it looks 
like when the second input on the card is closed the first input looses 
it's lock.

This obviously makes it pretty useless for MythTv and as a result it's 
not currently being used, which is a shame!

I'm using the ngene driver from the stock 2.6.35.4 kernel on Gentoo.

Does anyone else see this problem?  Is there anything I can do to try 
and fix / debug it?  Are there any bug fixes in the latest kernel that 
might help, or in the linux-dvb drivers that would help?

Any help or advice much appreciated.

Thanks,
Robert.

[1] - 
http://www.mailinglistarchive.com/html/mythtv-users@mythtv.org/2010-10/msg00725.html

[2] - https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/87392/