vu+ solo2 se lonrisun clone tuner problems

[clydeuk]

Hi.

Have a problem with this receiver. Was working fine last week then got stuck when I rebooted it. Tried flashing new images but then I have no tuning. I've done the V4 update and tried a lot of images, but most show no signal. I found a sunray image of Blackhole 2.10 which gave me tuning on LNB A, but it keeps losing lock. I have checked my dish by connecting direct to my Freesat TV and the signal is perfect. It seems strange that a few images give me some tuning and others nothing.

The earliest images I can find are from November 2014, and since I bought this receiver in October 2014 and never updated it, the original image must have been older than this. I am wondering if the box is faulty, or is it a driver problem?

Does anyone know where I can find an old image from 2013 to try?

 

[Ferret]

Hi.

Have a problem with this receiver. Was working fine last week then got stuck when I rebooted it. Tried flashing new images but then I have no tuning. I've done the V4 update and tried a lot of images, but most show no signal. I found a sunray image of Blackhole 2.10 which gave me tuning on LNB A, but it keeps losing lock. I have checked my dish by connecting direct to my Freesat TV and the signal is perfect. It seems strange that a few images give me some tuning and others nothing.

The earliest images I can find are from November 2014, and since I bought this receiver in October 2014 and never updated it, the original image must have been older than this. I am wondering if the box is faulty, or is it a driver problem?

Does anyone know where I can find an old image from 2013 to try?

The v4 update is your problem . No one can pinpoint the problem or why this happens but some clones on taking the v4 update have tuner issues.

No way back either.

 

[clydeuk]

Funny though I think it might have already had V4 on as it was accepting V4 images before I reflashed it, I only reflashed the V4 because I thought it may have been the problem.

I think probably this box is just shite

 

[ketmp]

The Solo2 se was released after the Solo2 and was more forgiving on images than v4 flashed boxes (ie some were able to take sunray images) this implied that Solo2se had, if you want, higher than v4 flash.

Therefore, I suspect you've probably downgraded your box back to v4 and as mentioned by Ferret, it's resulted in dreaded tuner problem.

 

[clydeuk]

You're probably right, although the reason I did the V4 update was because I was having the tuner problem with all the images I tried.

I've decided to buy a genuine Vu+ box, would still like to experiment with this if I can find a solution. Maybe something will come up in the future.

 

[ketmp]

I assume you never had a copy of the image that was working fine to start with before it started playing up?

If you see here this is bootloader for solo2 and solo2se.

You could try playing around with different combinations as you have nothing to lose except a possible brick but as you suffer from tuner problem anyhow it's all but bricked.

Sunray images are first port of call to try with before trying a v4 image.

You could, firstly, try a v2 image (I can't remember if anyone with the tuner problem tried an older v2 image).

NB: To download you need five useful posts so please don't post clock. Please come back and tell us how you get on. We'll help as much as we can.

Just maybe you could, with trying different things, manage to get an image working on these boxes with tuner problem and share your finding with others in similar situation

 

[clydeuk]

Ok, I have now established that the box is faulty. I bought a new genuine Vu+ Solo2 which works perfectly. To be honest, I always wanted the real Solo2 and bought this from a UK seller about 18 months ago under the assumption that it was genuine. When I got it and saw it was an SE with no display I was disappointed, more so when I googled it and discovered it was a clone. But I kept it as it worked perfectly until last week. Anyway I always intended to buy the real thing.

Anyway, I have flashed Blackhole 2.09 to this faulty clone, and have now found that when the box is cold, it will work on tuner A, but as it warms up it starts breaking up and after a while end up with no signal. So the problem is not the images or the dish, but heat related. I don't like things that don't work so I'm wondering if the FPGA needs reflowing. Or I could try a bigger heatsink to see if that helps, the only problem is the one fitted appears to be glued on somehow.

Otherwise, is there anything else I could use this for? Something that doesn't require the tuners? Perhaps set up to stream from my main box on another TV?

It does not seem too fussy on images, but after reading all the threads I've decided to keep an old 2013 image on it just in case.

 

[Ferret]

You could use it as a server if your into that !

 

[clydeuk]

Thinking on this one, it's definitely heat related as I left it on till the signal dropped out, then stuck it in the fridge for 10 minutes. Plugged it back in and signal back to 100% and no breakup. Looked through a lot of threads here and noticed most pictures show the Broadcom chip with a black heatsink with a fin each side. Mine has a different heatsink, hard to describe but of the type where I could possibly attach a fan to it, but there is already a small fan above this, i assume to draw heat from the whole box. The heatsink does get quite hot. The fan fitted is only small but anything bigger would probably be noisy and I have doubts whether it would make any difference. I'm wondering if it would be worth trying to remove the heatsink that's fitted and replacing it a better one from an old PC maybe. Of course this will depend on whether I can remove the existing one and attach another without doing any damage, I assume it's attached with some kind of adhesive.

Since tuner B doesn't seem to work properly even when cold I don't know whether the BCM chip is faulty or whether this is a soldering problem. If I wanted to try and reflow it I would need to get the heatsink off. I have a hot air soldering station but have never had any success reflowing BGA chips in Xbox etc. I don't have the equipment to remove the chip and reball it unfortunately.

Think I will try improving the cooling first and see where that takes me.

 

[clydeuk]

Well managed to get this going after a bit of a bodge. I found by heating and cooling that there was a faulty ic on the underside of the board, close to the card readers. IC type AX6631 which I googled and found is an adjustable LDO regulator. Hooking up a meter I found when cold it was giving 1.88v with no signal problems, but after heating the output was gradually increasing and at 1.96v signal started to drop out then lost signal completely.

AX6631 is not available in the UK, though the fault could possibly be the 2 resistors that set the output voltage, but as these are about the size of a grain of sand I decided on a different approach. I found a fixed 1.8v output regulator on a scrap plasma tv control board. Decided to give this a try, removed the existing device and tacked this one in, only 3 connections, input, output and gnd. This works perfectly, now tested for 2 days and with some recent clone images which would not work previously.

It's a bit bodged, I've stuck it to the bottom of the PCB with glue and had to insulate the tab as it carries the output rather than ground.

Without a circuit diagram I can't tell what the purpose of this regulator is, but it must have something to do with the tuners as both now work flawlessly.

So if anyone else finds they have tuner dropout first try cooling the receiver down to see if it's heat related and if it is, check the output of the AX6631, seems this is critical.