Topfield satellite receiver teardown
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- čas přidán 17. 09. 2022
- This satellite receiver cost me 4.90€ at a second hand store. But what did I get it for?
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That’s a great score. A HDD like that could always be handy for spare computer builds or test installations.
Thanks for recording and post - I've always been interested in seeing what's inside a satellite receiver, but harder to find more modern receivers that people take apart.
You are welcome :)
Cool, i still use my topfield HD satellite with harddisk, i had to recap mine last year, still works fine
Good find, and a fun teardown. The coin cell was adjacent to an Xtal and a Resonator, so it could have supported a RTC (Real Time Clock) chip. The resonator is probably 32KHz, the Xtal could be anything. Suggesting that the box kept time for some reason.
It would indeed make sense if the box had been able to keep time even in case of a power outage.
I was a long time customer of Topfield here in Germany. Had 3 models over 21 years and was always happy with them. Sadly they don’t produce any Receivers anymore…
Some of the British cable co DVRs have 2.5 inch 1TB drives and the cable company for some reason don't collect them when a contract ends so they often end up at car boot sales.
Unfortunately here in Germany the cable companies want their receivers returned to them when your contract ends, we even had to return a receiver that was dead.
@@DrCassette yes it's a shame because you know they're going to be scrapped
I agree with the decision not to use the disk for anything important (at least anything that isn't already kept backed up elsewhere). I've sometimes seen older disks develop pending sectors that they can't read from. Normally overwriting that particular sector with new data will cause the drive to reevaluate the sector, and if it appears to be permanently dead the drive will automatically substitute another location of the disk to store that sector. But often, the sector appears to work correctly again and the drive continues using it normally. Even so, when a disk does this (and it can't be confidently tracked down to an obvious transient incident such as accidentally losing power in the middle of a write) I consider the drive suspect because once faulty writes have happened once in normal operation, they will probably happen again at some point, resulting in more lost data.
As for the interface CRC errors, I'm not an expert, but I believe this just refers to the number of communication problems that have occurred between the drive and the system/computer over the drive's life. For instance, if you have a faulty or loose drive cable this number may increase. In that case, as long as the number is low and isn't regularly increasing, it should be nothing to worry about.
I totally agree with you and Jonas in this point, I usually use such old drives for experiments with Virtual Machines or for copying over large data that I will soon delete anyway, without abusing my SSDs lifetime.
That was a good deal.
I stil own this Topfield Satellite receiver. Was a nice receiver but now we have fiber internet and TV so we do not use it anymore.
Ich habe meinen alten Tevion Sat-Receiver auch zerlegt, da er seit Jahren nicht mehr in Benutzung war, nachdem ein Samsung Sat-Receiver ins Haus kam, der bis heute gute Dienste leistet, wenn man denn mal Fernseh schaut (Kommt ja immer seltener vor ;-) ) Auch im Tevion war eine WD HDD (eine der blauen) mit - ich glaube - 250 GB Speicher. Die hat allerdings im Receiver schon unschöne Geräusche gemacht, kurz nach dem Ausbau uns Auslesen am PC hat sie dann auch den Geist aufgegeben.
Mit den blauen WD habe ich über die Jahre auch eher wenig Glück gehabt...
3,3V could be for Processor purposes and 2,4V is clearly for the Heater of the VFD ;)
My internal hard drive cant be accessed and it cant find external hard drives, except one and it wants to reformat it, but its full and i dont want to lose the content. I can unplug it and put another hard drive in that has nothing on it, and format it. When i turn it off, i have to do it again, and the channels are blank until i click on them. So i assumed it musnt have power in that battery. I got one from the supermarket and replaced it. But it didnt fix anything. I am not tech savvy enough to know what the problem is. Nothing looks broken
Did that work with Sky TV?
I don't know if I didn't understand you properly, if that's the case I'm sorry, but I don't think CR2032 batteries are hard to find. You can find them even under the Amazonbasics brand.
CR2032 batteries are indeed readily available. The one in this DVR was very well hidden and difficult to access, so not at all easy to replace. That's what I was trying to say.
@@DrCassette Ah thank you!
can you plz pass a link for the store where you buy it
It is just a local second hand store.
You should have checked if there is any contents on that hard drive using the receiver and TV before you format it.
Quite often the video is in a propritory format
@@TheChipmunk2008 That's why you have to use the receiver and TV as I mentioned.
@@Capturing-Memories Indeed you did.... It's been a long day (grin)
I deliberately didn't check for any recordings on the HDD. It was a PVR, so there would have only been old TV recordings, and I have plenty of those that I still need to go through. I check recordings on DVD/HDD recorders as those have A/V inputs, so there may be interesting stuff dubbed from other media, or home videos or so.
@@TheChipmunk2008 In case of my old cheap Tevion sat receiver I was able to just play the videos on my computer, since this thing didn't bother to encrypt the drive or use proprietary file formats/encodings.