DirecTV H23-600 Channel Changing Problems

[bstowers]

I've been trying to figure out what's going wrong with channel changing on the new rig I'm building. They were supposed to bring me a H20 receiver, but they left me with this one that apparently is pretty new since I can't find any information about people using it with Sage or much of anything else.

Anyway, I've been fighting with it for a few days now. I'm using the Paterson cable. When I first got it up and running, it would change channels sometimes, but not for very long without stopping completely. To fix it, I would need to pull the cable from the PC, attempt to change channels, plug the cable back in, and then it would work again for a bit. That worked the first day, but after that it just failed to change channels at all no matter what. After messing with the hardware, I've gone from a PCI card with serial ports on it to a USB adapter cable and software driver that lets me use on my USB ports on the PC. I don't think the hardware (ports or cables) is the problem. I've been using the DTVControl program (http://www.dtvcontrol.com/) and a lot of the stuff in it does work fine. For example, there's a command to get the date/time from the receiver, and that works fine. Also, the Guide and Menu buttons work as expected. On to of that, I can use the number keys in the application to punch in a channel number, and that works too. But there is a channel area of the application where you can read the current channel by clicking the Get button (that works), and an edit control where you can type in a channel number and click Set. It's the Set button that always fails, and I'm guessing that whatever method it's using is also the method the DTV serial control in SageTV is using also, and that's why it fails.

Now, if anyone reading this is any good with inner workings of the receiver control over the serial port, here's a dump of the DTVCon output window when I try to do a channel set:

--> FA A6
<-- F0 Valid Command
--> 01 62 FF FF
--- Timeout

In that example, I was attempting to set to channel 354 (0162 hex = 354 decimal). I assume "FA A6" is a request to send a channel number, and it appears to be recognized as a valid command.

I've tried messing with the Experiment part of the app, sending things like "FA A6 01 62 FF FF FF FF" thinking maybe they (DirecTV) extended the size of the data being sent for the channel number and the receiver was waiting on more bytes and not getting them, but that just gets the same Timout failure.

Oh, and I'm using the D10-100 command set in DTVCon, but I've tried using them all. D10-100 just seems to be the one that everything except Set Channel command works in. The others have fewer working commands.

Anyone have any clues what might be going wrong here? Or, is there some switch that I could use in SageTV to tell it to send channel number commands seperately (multiple FA A5 commands) instead of as a single command (FA A6) since that does work for me?