Weird Humax events

[SimonH2]

You mean, so you can look at their site, get a list, and then go elsewhere to buy them ?
Well actually, you can do that anyway - just open up the box, make a list of caps, then go off and buy some. Don't forget to carefully check the specs though - not all electrolytics are suitable for PSU applications due to the ripple current rating. Or you can pay a modest premium for someone else to have done that for you.

He did include a bit in his last blog about the state of the business. He said that he thinks he might have to close down before too long. Just too many people are happy to go and buy the cheapest tat off eBay - and that makes it hard for any genuine business to compete. At least that's the case if you have any pretence about offering things that work and you are prepared to stand behind.

 

[JBR]

Yes, I take your point.
It's not as if he's ripping people off anyway, is it?
If the problem persists or re-occurs, I'll gladly lay out a tenner for the 'kit'.

 

[Sam Gangee]

I've just been looking further at that site and see that it doesn't actually list what is supplied in the 'kit'. If it is just two or three capacitors, it could be cheaper to buy them individually.

I knew I'd seen the answer to this somewhere but it took me a while to find it!
See What Parts are in your Kit?
http://www.satcure.co.uk/useful/tech_help.htm#kits

 

[Lucid]

OK, call me a cynic, but I wonder why they don't simply list each capacitor supplied with its specification.
I know £10 isn't going to break the bank, but I thought that electronic components are generally dirt cheap.

Crappy ones are relatively cheap.... and that's exactly why you're now having to consider forking out money for replacement bits.

Also, any time I've done repairs to customer's equipment I have always used better components. What's the point of installing the exact same component that is already known to be underspecified and likely to fail again? That was the cause of the problem in the first place.

Better components in terms of capacitors means simple things such as a higher heat rating and a larger capacity (in microFarads usually). But it also means a better brand. That's not so easy to pick out as a rating. It takes experience to select something that's both better than the original but not so high in quality that it's OTT for the particular application.

If you had to put in the time and spend the money on various different makes of capacitor to then draw up a suitable parts list then you'd spend quite a bit more than £10. Or you can just take the short cut and benefit from someone else's experience. Sure, you're paying for the experience, and for someone to hold stock, process the order, write instructions, ship it, pay the card processing fees, offer after-sales support and of course make a profit to pay for wages and web costs and National Insurance and Income Tax and Pensions etc etc.... wow, all that out of a tenner. Or you can be a cheap ass and save a couple of quid by going it alone on best guess. Just saying....................

 

[JBR]

Thanks, all, for your help.
As I said, I apologise for sounding like a tight git and, should the problem re-occur, I'll send for one of these kits.

Mind you, the fact that someone has gone to the trouble to supply more reliable components for this PVR would suggest that it isn't the fantastic bit of kit that Which? magazine seems to believe.

 

[SimonH2]

Mind you, the fact that someone has gone to the trouble to supply more reliable components for this PVR would suggest that it isn't the fantastic bit of kit that Which? magazine seems to believe.

Unfortunately it's a fact of life that if you are selling widgets, then the average customer is going to want cheap. There are a few who will pay extra for premium quality - but except for a few low volume brands, this doesn't pay the bills. So part of engineering ay product is squeezing every last penny off the bill of materials.
Electrolytic caps are one of those areas where it's really tricky (even for a volume manufacturer - many got bitten by the electrolyte problems) to get the quality right.
The fallout from Capacitor Plague is still going on

Long gone are the days of being able to go and buy a "quality" product, designed carefully by "real engineers" where the primary consideration is product quality and reliability - except for certain niche products. We (and I doubt any of us could truly say we never contribute to this) have supported an industry which outsources manufacture to the cheapest possible (China, though I read the other day that Foxcon is now considering outsourcing to India due to wage inflation in China !) - and everyone laps up the latest shiny gadgets.

 

[JBR]

Capacitor Plague
A very interesting article. Thank you.

 

[Lucid]

Mind you, the fact that someone has gone to the trouble to supply more reliable components for this PVR would suggest that it isn't the fantastic bit of kit that Which? magazine seems to believe.

Which only test the products when relatively new. There aren't the resources avaliable to produce a meaningful batch test of enough of each model to rule out throwing the results with an premature failure. So all they can really do is test the functionality over a short period of time.

As SimonH2 said, we are looking for the lowest cost product to fulfil our needs. When goods like this were sold exclusively by retail stores you could go chat with a good local retailer and take their recommendation on the best brands for reliability. That doesn't happen very much now because manufacturers are selling through lots of channels where the product is sold on price alone. The trouble is that no-one values service and advice in advance. It's only when something goes wrong that people start to understand what they lost getting a cheaper deal. The ship has sailed.

 

[SimonH2]

The trouble is that no-one values service and advice in advance. It's only when something goes wrong that people start to understand what they lost getting a cheaper deal. The ship has sailed.

And for those that do value service and advice - we have few places left to go to because we aren't a big enough market to support the quality outlets that used to provide it.

I think the ship has not only sailed, it's well over the horizon and long out of sight.

 

[Lucid]

And for those that do value service and advice - we have few places left to go to because we aren't a big enough market to support the quality outlets that used to provide it.

I don't agree. I think the market is big enough. If anything it's bigger than it has ever been because product is cheaper now. How many households have TVs in the lounge, the kitchen, the conservatory, the kids bedrooms, maybe the master bedroom too. How many people have soundbars to go with those TVs, or home cinema kits, and games consoles and media players etc etc. Look how quickly folk replace the main TV now for something bigger, thinner, with 3D or Smart features or 4K now that it's well under £800.

What's killing the market is the obsession with price. The specialist Hi-Fi industry recognised this as a major barrier decades ago. When you take away the concern over price by making the product the same price everywhere then folk start to look thing such as pre-sales service and advice, range choice, and the reputation for after-sales support as ways to differentiate between resellers. How much more relaxed would a person be walking in to a bricks and mortar store to look at TVs knowing that that retailer could sell at a price to match Amazon or Pixmania or John Lewis or Currys. Some might say that the Hi-Fi industry is in decline and so make the supposition that that pricing model clearly failed. Yes, specialist Hi-Fi is in decline, but it's because of changing fashion and the move to portable media; not because of pricing.

The obsession with price is one aspect of the greed on which much of the industry runs. Manufacturers have been very short-sighted. I know this from first hand experience. Retailers and consumers are just as much to blame. The Government hasn't helped either. They abolished RRP, but worse than that they made it so that manufacturers and distributors of mass market electronics goods can no longer pick and choose dealers. That opened up supply to any Tom, Dick or Harry whether they were capable of doing a good job or were just a bunch of cowboys looking to fleece customers. In an ill-advised move to tackle what was wrongly seen as the anti-competitive nature of the retail electronics industry. The Government did more to reduce consumer choice and kill good customer support and so harm consumer interests than ever the industry did by self regulation. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water.

It's the same old story. The wealthy can afford to go shop with the integrators and high-end retail stores where knowledge and good after-sales support still exists. Everyone else is left with a poor selection of 'me too' e-tailers and discount sheds doing a poor job of anything other than chucking some product on the web. The middle ground is served by the likes John Lewis who do an okay job, Richers who are more interested in selling end-of-line product at a discount, and the small number of decent old style electrical stores offering something more specialised such as home cinema projection and decent separates surround systems.

 

[Sam Gangee]

Plus a few "Mom & Pop" specialist web sites trying to work on an incredibly tight budget while still providing personal advice and support for products - many of which are designed to last a year and a day.

 

[Dave54]

Have you done an automatic retune lately? After I put up a new aerial my Humax picked up another set of signal from somewhere (probably a repeater somewhere) This gives very weird dual schedule type behaviour, basically because it was seeing two channels the same.
Try a manual retune. The instructions are online. That cured mine.

 

[JBR]

Have you done an automatic retune lately? After I put up a new aerial my Humax picked up another set of signal from somewhere (probably a repeater somewhere) This gives very weird dual schedule type behaviour, basically because it was seeing two channels the same.
Try a manual retune. The instructions are online. That cured mine.

Yes. I did one (automatic) yesterday. No duplicate channels, though.

 

[Dave54]

If I remember right, and you know how quickly you forget what exactly was done with these type of things, the only real indication was that the recording schedules were duplicated. I don't think the channels were obviously duplicated.
It didn't happen with all of them either.
Anyway it's worth having a go at manual tuning. It's not really "manual" as such, it's just that you choose to scan the bands (if that's what they are called) that are broadcast by the mast you want. I did mine yesterday, took under 5 minutes.
You should do an auto scan first and immediately stop it and save, to delete any existing channels.

 

[SimonH2]

It's not really "manual" as such, it's just that you choose to scan the bands (if that's what they are called) that are broadcast by the mast you want.

Confusingly, they are called channels - or to avoid confusion you can call them multiplexes which isn't quite correct but is near enough. The numbers (in the 40-something to 50-something range for my main TX) are RF channel numbers - each of which corresponds to a specific frequency. Each RF channel in use carries a digital transport stream (TS) which is a multiplex of several logical channels plus some control and other information (such as a list of multiplexes and RF channels used by that TX*, and the EPG). The tuner then extracts one program stream from the multiplex for decoding and display to the user as a logical channel (the number the user sees is called the logical channel number (LCN)).
So two completely and only tenuously connected uses of the word "channel".

And just to round off the confusion, many people talk about the actual content as a channel - the most notable being "Channel 4" and "Channel 5". So when using the word channel, you have to be careful to specify which usage you are using if it's not clear and unambiguous from the context.

* Some systems, MythTV is one, can use this information to allow you to tell it just one RF channel frequency - and then it can automatically scan all the other frequencies for that TX only.