I took delivery of my AzBox miniMe on Thu, Oct 20th. It was to be used on my fully functioning C-Band system alongside the Traxis 6000 I'd bought from DrSat a few years ago. It seemed to play fairly well overall but their were transponders that absolutely would not scan into the miniMe. This was while I was watching the Traxis that was connected to the IF output of the miniME and the Traxis was displaying a perfectly good signal and good video on the transponders I was unsucessfully trying to program into the miniMe. The miniMe absolutely could not scan into memory Galaxy 16's 3813H/SR8030 and 3845H/SR8703 all the while the Traxis is playing them fine. Yes, I tried the miniMe by itself without anything else connected - no change.
I tried EVERYTHING. manual scans, blind scans, direct PID entry, shifting the frequency and SR up and down a bit, all kinds of combos of S/S2 and QPSK/8PSK/AUTO even if I knew they weren't right (I'd already tried the CORRECT settings, they didn't produce anything). DAYS of different methoods and settings all to no avail on these two transponders while the Traxis loafed along with good signal strength and quality on them. Once in a while I'd get one garbage entry into the miniMe's memory that was always the same, an entry for
"Freq: 3813 MHz Service 0" that never produced anything useful.
The miniMe had no problem with the lower symbol rate or higher symbol rate transponders on Galaxy 16: 3795H/SR3255 and the high-SR ABC feeds on 4120 and 4140 scanned into memory and played just fine.
Finally after almost a week of frustration I decided to try to revert back to an earlier firmware version to see if that would help. The unit was delivered with the current version and an update check over the Internet from the miniMe's menu confirmed this. I had read my documentation and was fully aware that under no circumstances was I to touch the Recovery switch on the back, therefore I did not. I examined the firmware options that the miniMe's menu presented to me. I then referred to the list of approved firmware versions listed at
http://dealers.azbox.ca/cfm/azbox/support.cfm . I did a general Internet search for miniMe firmware upgrade issues and read everything I could find on
axbox.ca and
azboxamericas.com and found no cautions about reverting to an earlier firmware version as long as it was specifically approved for the AzBox miniMe
American edition.
Having done my research I began the process of moving to an earlier version of the firmware. I did this entirely over the Internet using the list of available firmware in the miniMe's menu. I selected version 1.87 from the miniMe's menu and initiated the process. The miniMe successfully downloaded the firmware and reported that its installation was a success. The last thing I saw from my receiver was a screen saying that it needed to reboot to complete the process. I've never seen another screen from it.
I tried the recovery process I found described on a message board thread involving holding the "
1" key down on the remote during boot
numerous times but I've never seen anything other than a black screen. The miniMe's blue light flickers a few times during boot and switches from blue to orange and then back to blue but nothing comes out of any of the three video ports, no logo or messages to indicate an active receiver. I've also checked my router log and the miniMe is not present in the router's list of assigned IPs like it was before. The lack of video and network activity tells me this thing is dead. Is there anything else I should try before returning this unit to DrSat for warranty repair?
