Struggling to find a PCI DVB-S card

[John@TunerUK]

Hi All.
I'm currently in the process of building a machine for a mate. I have the technotrend Budget PCI 3200 S2 card and CI which I bought from DVBshop.net. However, they seem to have stopped selling them, and so I've had a browse on here and noticed a few people using the FireDTV S2 card.
I've been searching for them online, and so far haven't had much luck. Where did you guys get yours from?
Also, do they come with a common interface, or is it an extra?

Cheers in advance

John

EDIT: I notice the Floppy DTV is the internal version, but it still needs an internal Firewire connection.
That explains why I had issues finding it.
Floppy DTV S2 Card

[Lucas]

The Floppy DTV S2 can also be connected to an external firewire port.

[MCE-Refugee]

The CI is built in.

You can also daisy-chain the Firewire cable from one tuner to another so only need one Firewire connector on the motherboard for multiple tuners.

Normally the tuner is fitted into a PCI/PCIe slot in the case but takes no power from the actual socket so actually they can be fitted anywhere. I have a couple that fit into the space for a floppy disk drive at the front of the case (hence the name I suppose).

Having used a variety of DVB-S(2) tuner cards over the years both with & without CI I can categorically state that the FloppyDTV-S(2) is far & away the best card that I have used. The build quality is immaculate & the software support excellent with drivers for Windows of various versions, Mac OS X & Linux. It is also the most expensive card that I have used which may not be unrelated.

[John@TunerUK]

Does it come with an adaptor for fitting it to a firewire pin connector on the motherboard? If not I'll have to root one out or order one. Looks like that's going to be the tuner of choice though.

[rickgillyon]

Yes, floppydtv has a reversible firewire cable so it can connect to the motherboard, however this then uses the firewire passthrough on the card so you can't daisy-chain another off it (although the second card might work with the cable reversed again, not sure).

You can get most of those tricky-to-get PCI cards at smartcard24.com.

FireDTV at kustompcs.co.uk or online from digital-everywhere.com.

[John@TunerUK]

Got the cards, and the good news is, daisychaining works just fine the other way around, so they're connected nice and neatly to the motherboard pins.

The only probem is, I've just disconnected one to avoid confusion, added it as a source in sage, connected my sky feed to it, and done a channel scan. All the settings are the same as on my own Technotrend card, but I'm picking up no channels whatsoever.

Any ideas where I might be going wrong?

EDIT: Started a new thread in hardware. Although any suggestions in this thread are more than welcome
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=39544