TBS6904 DVB-S2 Quad Tuner PCIe Card

[routerunner]

Hello all,

been long time away from this forum, I know

I was just curious if any of you have some experience on the aforementioned capture card with SageTV (v7.0) in native mode?

Many thanks

Cheers
Eddy

[something fishy]

Yes
I installed one quite recently to replace a TBS 6985 that seemed to be suffering picture breakup on an increasingly frequent basis.

Installed painlessly with the latest drivers from TBS website. All four tuners visible. I use it with 2x DVBSky S952v3.1 cards. Seems to work fine (cured the breakup anyway).

I copied the information across from frq files for the 6985 but this only works after you've done a manual channel scan (on each of the four tuners) but that is true of all new capture cards if they're a fresh type.

Running SageTV x64 (v9.2.1) on Win10 Home x64.

What do you need to know?

Eric

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by something fishy

Yes
I installed one quite recently to replace a TBS 6985 that seemed to be suffering picture breakup on an increasingly frequent basis.

Installed painlessly with the latest drivers from TBS website. All four tuners visible. I use it with 2x DVBSky S952v3.1 cards. Seems to work fine (cured the breakup anyway).

I copied the information across from frq files for the 6985 but this only works after you've done a manual channel scan (on each of the four tuners) but that is true of all new capture cards if they're a fresh type.

Running SageTV x64 (v9.2.1) on Win10 Home x64.

What do you need to know?

Eric

Hi Eric, thank you very much for the info.

I need to replace my current server motherboards and bought a new Supermicro one, but unfortunately the 2x TBS 6985 I've got are not recognised by the new mobo, apparently the PCIe 1.0a of those cards is not 100% PCIe compliant and the Supermicro refuses to see them, other PCIe 1.0a cards I tested on the Supermicro working just fine.

TBS confirmed that they replaced the 6985 with the 6905 because of too many complains of incompatibility issues from customers and upgraded the PCIe to 2.0.

I noticed you run SageTV 9.2.1 whereas I'm on v7.0 stock, so not sure whether it will work, but might worth the try...

Many thanks

Cheers
Eddy

[something fishy]

Your expertise is greater than mine but they are bda drivers so I would hope they would work with SageTV 7. I upgraded to Sage v9 well before the 6904 appeared though, so I can't be sure.

The Octo tuner 6909 might be a viable option if you're looking to replace 2x 6985s. It takes either a quattro LNB (definitely in Windows) or a quad (emulating a quattro, I think - you'd have to doublecheck that the win10 drivers support this, they're not as flexible as the linux drivers).

I tried one and can confirm that all eight tuners are visible. Sadly I'd forgotten that Sage needs to do a channel scan to create and recognise the .frq file and thought that there was some issue with the card. My mistake - penalty of a long time stable system. I sent the 6909 back but my problem was user error, I don't think that there was any incompatibility with the card (a shame, it would have enabled me to lose the multiswitch in the interests of power use).

There are some reports that the tuners in the 6909 are less sensitive. Certainly the drivers report signal strength differently/lower. But using progdvb to test the 6909 didn't show anything amiss compared with either the S952 or the 6985 (before it was retired).

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by something fishy

Your expertise is greater than mine but they are bda drivers so I would hope they would work with SageTV 7. I upgraded to Sage v9 well before the 6904 appeared though, so I can't be sure.

The Octo tuner 6909 might be a viable option if you're looking to replace 2x 6985s. It takes either a quattro LNB (definitely in Windows) or a quad (emulating a quattro, I think - you'd have to doublecheck that the win10 drivers support this, they're not as flexible as the linux drivers).

I tried one and can confirm that all eight tuners are visible. Sadly I'd forgotten that Sage needs to do a channel scan to create and recognise the .frq file and thought that there was some issue with the card. My mistake - penalty of a long time stable system. I sent the 6909 back but my problem was user error, I don't think that there was any incompatibility with the card (a shame, it would have enabled me to lose the multiswitch in the interests of power use).

There are some reports that the tuners in the 6909 are less sensitive. Certainly the drivers report signal strength differently/lower. But using progdvb to test the 6909 didn't show anything amiss compared with either the S952 or the 6985 (before it was retired).

Hi, many thanks but the Octo is not an option for me as I have three LNBs attached to my Wave Frontier Toroidal dish, 2 Quads and 1 single in DiSEqC with one of the Quad for 13.0E, 19.2E & 28.2E (multilingual family )

Regarding the BDA drivers, yes despite the widely supported standard, still STV (at least v7.0) sadly doesn't support all BDA tuners on the market so it would be a gamble anyway.

I'm attempting to solve the Supermicro issue with a PCIe riser card I bought recently (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...?ie=UTF8&psc=1) which should, in theory, bridge the incompatibility I'm experiencing, but this is all speculation.

The TBS6904 is my last and very expensive resort in case nothing I'm trying will work. BTW on the TBS website those cards are on sale at a very good price, but always out of stock it seems?

Cheers
Eddy