Receivers » Conaxsat Reviews

AVERAGE RATING Reviews of the Mini/Duo/Trio

Conaxsat Trio Reviewed by Fogarty on 12-2-2008 (Beautiful albeit wet Oregon Coast)

Review of the Conaxsat Trio Receiver Why did I do this? I ordered the Conaxsat Trio for three reasons: First, I wanted to test another receiver in addition to my Viewsat PVR7000, and I wanted something that would be substantially different than the Viewsat products. I like Viewsat, and I believe that company has done a great job. But I wanted to try something else. Just because..... Conaxsat were the new kids on the block, and I liked what I was seeing in regard to their getting the software out, making improvements, and in general their attitude towards their customers. Secondly, I wanted to keep the ability to record and to pause live tv. I cannot imagine watching tv without the ability to hit a button, go take care of what one needs to take care of, then return to where you left off. The Conaxsat with it’s ability to record to a USB drive offered these features to me. The ability to record live tv needs a little refinement yet, but basically it is acceptable. I’ll talk to that some more in a minute. Finally, I choose the Trio instead of the Duo because it has a thing on it allowing you to play movies downloaded from “the net,” or other divx files. I did not know if this was something I would ever use, but it seemed like a plan, so I opted for the Trio. Besides, the Trio costs a few bucks more than the Duo (about $260 vs $200), so as my wife would say, “of course you would decide you just had to have that one dear....” I selected the Conaxsat because it is capable of recording to an USB drive. I selected the Trio instead of the Duo because it allows for divx support and I thought that was kind of cool, although at the time I really wasn’t sure what a divx was, if I owned one or not, or if it would be allowed in the house without the proper training. When it Showed up: What a cute LITTLE box it was that showed up. Inside the box was the usual things, batteries, remote, user’s manual, a/v cables, and an usb flash drive. Also the receiver (good thing!) The receiver is a really small guy, at least compared to my personal experiences with other receivers to date. It’s 9" deep, 12" wide and about 2" tall. I decided to put it on a shelf in my entertainment center by itself so it would not be intimidated by the pvr 7000 or the dishnet box. Hooking it up: I already had a 250GB USB drive that I had purchased as storage for movies I had recorded on the pvr7000, and copied to my computer. It was already formatted in Fat32, so I was able to hook it up to the Trio without even formatting it. Turns out the Trio can handle NTFS file systems with the divx thing, but not with the regular usb recording thing, so fat32 is the way to go with your file system. If your hard drive is not already formatted, the Trio will do that for you. There are three usb ports on the Trio. One in the back and two in the front under a little panel. You can plug your usb drive into the back port or the top front port. The other front port is to access your divx media. I keep the usb drive plugged into the back port most of the time. However, since I already had some movies on it that I had converted from the pvr7000, I found I could move the cable from it’s normal home behind the machine, plug into the divx port on the front, and watch the movies I had copied from the pvr7000 on my divx player. I use the regular usb front port to transfer software downloaded from the internet and stored on the cute little flashdrive that came with the thing. Then basically, all you need to do is hook up the coax and go into the setup process. It is helpful to plug the receiver in as well. When it’s turned on there’s a nice blue light on it’s front. I guess some folks felt it was too bright, so Conaxsat has released a menu option to turn it off if you choose to do that. I don’t. The remote is well organized with the typical layout of buttons. In addition to the normal channel changing, volume adjusting, and power type buttons, there are some that are used for the pvr functions such as record, stop, pause, fast forward, and rewind. Then there’s a section for buttons one never uses, such as sub-t, av/tv, pr, etc. They don’t get in the way too much. My idea of a good receiver is one that offers a minimum amount of resistance to getting done what I want done, which is primarily to watch tv. I like enough complexity to require a little thought, but not so much as would require reading the instructions (or more to the point, having my wife read the instructions). The Trio has fulfilled is mission in this regard. You can pretty much hook it up by yourself, even if you are a rocket scientist. Any fine points of concern can be easily researched on the web site. Setting it up: The menu system (accessed coincidentally by pressing “Menu”) is very straight forward. Even a Harvard grad should be able to figure this one out. My biggest problem in getting used to the Conaxsat is I sometimes work too hard. For instance I had a hard time trying to figure out how to set up a “Favorites” list. All that is required is to press the yellow button on any channel you want in “Favorites 1-8" and you’re set. Didn’t seem to me it should be so easy, so I kept trying other things that didn’t work too well. It’s not completely my fault because I’ve learned that for me, setting up a favorites list means I’m within minutes of deciding I just have to do a “factory default” and set everything up from scratch. So I don’t do that. Anyway, when you press the “Menu” button, the first thing you see is an option named “Channel Manager.” As one might suspect this is where we’ll do amazing things like Favorites, Rename, Move (still haven’t figured that one out though), Lock, and Delete. Delete’s the best of the bunch though in that you can delete individual channels, all channels on a tp, or all channels on a satellite. Powerful stuff, and if you don’t try to out think it, easy to do. But we’re not ready to do that, because the first thing you’re going to want to do is set up the antenna settings and satellite options. That’s the next block, cleverly named “Installations.” In this section you set up the satellites, lnb types, switch options, and monitor your signals. You also would use this section for motor entries. The satellite entries are well explained and again, like everything else with this receiver, very straight forward. I really liked the fact that it had an entry called Dishpro Fss for my linear dishpro lnbs such as 121 and 118.7. Other menu options worthy of note include a setting to specify how much information you want to have appear in the epg on every screen, varying from 60 minutes to 180 minutes. I choose 90 minutes for mine, a renumbering option for Bell OR Dish (I figure that might appeal to some of our Canadian friends), time adjustment and date & time settings. When the receiver is off, the time of day shows on the front led, which if you can see better than I can, is kind of nice. Another nice feature is in the “Utilities” section where you can do a “Save DB” and save the systems settings to your usb drive for setting the unit back up at a later time if need be. Things I like about the Trio: I’m really impressed with it’s ease of use. Enough options to allow for a little individuality, yet you don’t really have to spend all your time keeping it going. I can only compare it to other receivers I have used, or to some extent to reports coming in from other receivers, and I’m comfortable in saying this has to be one of the most user friendly machines out there. I mentioned before that sometimes I work too hard trying to get the receiver to do something. For instance I spent a long time trying to figure out how to play a movie I recorded. I went clear through the menu system, I went over all the usb options, I stood around with one foot in the air while drawing mystical circles with my left hand, I did all kinds of things. How is it done? You press “play.” Duh. Press “play” and a menu pops up telling you all the things you have available to play. The video and sound quality are excellent. That seems to me to be something we’ve come to take for granted in our business, but I’m still impressed by it. My Dishnet 508 pvr (few years old now) does not come close to the video and audio quality of the Trio. I am absolutely thrilled that I can record a movie, take the usb drive and connect it to my pc, open the movie with VideoRedo and remux it to an mpg file, save it on the pc and have it play beautifully. This is something that absolutely cannot be achieved with the Viewsat pvr7000. I have around 100 hours of movies that can testify to that fact. This single capability was what I really hoped for when I bought the Trio. Now, I can burn the converted movies to DVD and be assured of a high quality end product. Thank you Conaxsat for that capability. Things that could be better: It appears that if you have something scheduled to be recorded the system will “forget” you told it to do that if you mess with the antenna settings, or change the satellites you’re looking at, or much of anything else. That needs improved and I suspect it will be. It would be nice if there was a counter somewhere that would tell you how many channels you have. That’s a little thing, but it seems to be something we always end up comparing notes about. “How many you got?” “Really? Gosh I got more than that!!” I suspect this modification will be made at some point. I’d like the time-shifting to be a little smoother for pausing, rewinding live tv. Currently what happens is when you first press a time-shifting button, such as “pause” for instance, it will begin recording the program. Once the drive cycles up and all that, then you can rewind, pause, fast forward the program because you are actually recording it. But it’s being recorded with it’s real name rather than in a temporary file location, so over time if you use this option much you will have zillions of little files on the hard drive that you’ll eventually have to delete manually. It would be better if the live-tv recording would start when you tune to a channel and write to/rewrite a specific temporary file name much as dishnet does it. When it’s recording you have very little ability to do anything else, for instance browse the epg to see what’s coming on later. This is a single tuner recorder so naturally you cannot watch anything else while recording (except for channels on the same tp) but I find myself often pressing “pause” on my pvr’s, then going into the epg to see what’s about to come on, scedule later recordings and the like. It would be nice if this could be done. Something I have always wanted in other receivers is a “find next” sort of an option. So, when you enter a channel number, if that number doesn’t exist the receiver would tune to the next highest number. I got in trouble over this once when my wife was watching me look to see if there was any ppv movies worth recording. To find out, I tuned to channel 495, then started paging up stream from there. “Why did you go to 495?” she asked. “Because I can’t remember where the ppv’s start, so I just select that one and go from there.” “So” she responds, “you can’t remember where the ppv’s are, but you can remember where that porn station is???” Overall impression: Very favorably impressed with this machine and with the timely response to corrections demonstrated by Conaxsat so far. I would buy this machine again, and in fact intend to buy one for one of my kids. In his case, I certainly want one that will perform well without a lot of grief because otherwise I’ll be getting the phone calls. The minimal amount of improvements needed I’m sure will come in time. Congratulations to Conaxsat for creating such a nice product. 8/5/2007 by Fogarty.

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