Significance of SID to missing Freesat channel?

[spinynorman]

Hi,
I'm trying to narrow down the reason for poor Freesat reception on certain channels. I've got a Mk1, region 1 (west Wales) Sky dish with recently replaced Thompson LNB and a Manhattan HD-S2 receiver.

The channels which work are perfect and those which don't show 'no signal' or a severely pixellated display. A tree growing in a very inaccessible spot thirty feet away from the dish may be a factor. When things got really bad three weeks ago I aligned the dish using a cheapo analogue meter and that brought back most of the channels I watch but it's been bad again over the last few days. Maybe the tree grew a bit more, maybe a fault elsewhere got worse.

Today I printed the Freesat channel technical specs and noticed that channel 101, BBC One Wales HD which works perfectly, and channel 107, BBC Four HD which shows 'no signal' have identical specs apart from their unique SIDs. In my ignorance I may be over simplifying things but I can imagine why subtle dish misalignment and the tree might combine to reduce signal quality for certain frequencies etc whilst others are less affected.

In this example I'd expect whatever dish position I've set to work equally well or badly with those two channels. Is it possible that poor signal quality is responsible or does it maybe point to a fault with the receiver or LNB? I don't want to tackle the tree unnecessarily. With the exception of 107, all channels between 101 and 134 work fine but between 135 and 159 I have fourteen which don't work at all.

 

[Lucid]

SID is the Service ID. You can think of it like the umbrella under which all the elements to make a channel are assembled. This then identifies and differentiates BBC Four HD from the other channels being broadcast in the same frequency and polarity group as BBC One Wales and any others on 11023 MHz, Horizontal Polarisation.

Satellite isn't my forte, so I'll bow out to those with superior knowledge, but I can't think of a reception issue that would cause one particular channel in a mux group to fail but not others. If it was an issue with trees or cable or the LNB then at the very least I'd expect all channels in that particular mux group to be affected in the same way. I wonder if the channel is somehow blocked by the Manhattan receiver?

 

[spinynorman]

I just tried 107 again and it's working normally. I didn't change anything or re-scan channels and the weather hasn't changed much apart from sun this afternoon with little or no wind and now dusk. The other missing channels are still missing. Maybe a receiver bug is at least part of the problem. I've had a few minor problems with this entry level Manhattan like flicking through channels and getting the audio of one with the video of another, weird EPG listings and the occasional lockup so I might try my luck with a Humax HB-1000S.