DM500 about to Die - so.....600 or 7020?

[blueuk808]

Any advice is greatly appreciated!!!

I have a DM500 which has been running happily for about 12 months hooked upto a motorised dish. Over the last couple of days I've started getting a problem of channels just getting dropped while watching. Basically the SNR drops from 90% to 50%, I get BER's and the picture just freezes. I ended up getting an engineer round to check the signal (ie rule out the dish alignment, arc, lnb and cabling) and it appears everything is in order - which all points to the receiver

So I have 2 options - try and rescue the receiver or replace.

First query is that I have been flashing the dreambox from the manual install window by renaming the images root.cramfs. This last reflash I used flashmaster (i think it was called) mainly because I cant get Dreamup working over a network and I've lost the null modem cable! I've been flashing with Gemini images as I have an original DM500 so I figured I was fairly safe. Question is, if I get a null modem cable and perhaps reflash with a different image, do you think some of these issues might get resolved - obviously if it's the tuner itself then reflashing won't sort the problem, but if the problem can be caused by a bad image flash, perhaps it could bring it back - I mean how likely is it that the tuner fails after 12 months of occasional watching??

Second query is - if I bite the bullet and go for a replacement I'm torn between getting the 600 or the 7020. I'm not overly bothered about PVR as I have a fileserver hooked up to a router, and the plan is to have the box on the network as well, so I could use ngrab or something similar? I want to hook 2 outputs from the DM - one to the amp in the main room setup and one to distribute round the house. That's about it really.

Any comments are greatly appreciated

[Jimdefruit]

If you are reflashing using the root cramfs method then you are probably leaving some dodgy code in the Dreambox memory. I would very strongly recommend that you use Dreamup and install erase.img via a serial connection which will completely clean the flash memory and then install a good maxvar image also using Dreamup and a null modem serial cable.

Forget the lan update method. It works fine for a while but then you will get the sort of problems that you experiencing.