Gekko Test and Review

[Pixl]

The unit comes with a Euro AC plug with no N.America adapter. My wife had one in her international travel pack and I was in business. They do include batteries for the remote, a nice HDMI cable, a bracket for mounting the receiver to the back of your tv, an IR extension with a long cord if you wish to keep the receiver out of sight as there is little need to access the front panel. The IR extension also has a red/green power indicator.
The rear panel has only one usb port, but they have included a two port usb hub for additional equipment. Other connectors are HDMI, RS-232, LAN, Mini AV output, optical SPDIF audio, lnb in, lnb out. There is no hard power switch, so to do a cold re-boot you have to yank the power connector or pull the ac adapter plug.

I powered up the unit, immediately got a display on my flat screen tv thru the HDMI input. Settings were already at 1080i. I was not able to get any output at all from the mini AV jack. I’ll have to investigate this for the users with older NTSC TVs.
The factory software was at v2.09.61 I set up the only sat in the Euro list I can get, 30w. Ran a blind scan that got stuck at 25%.





Thursday, April 12

EB advised me to download and install the latest ver v2.10.29. Re-ran blind scan and brought in 50 fta channels.
The lack of N. American sats is slowing down my tests. The existing sats can be edited using the remote, but not the orbital position. So I put my orbital position in with the sat name and I end up with two positions in the sat list. At this point I really want a channel editor to clean up this list in on pass. EB pointed me to a few channel editors, one of which I downloaded from a site in the Netherlands. None were compatible with the export data from the Gekko. EB had me load in a newer software version that was supposed to have N.A. sats in it. This got me an upgrade to v2.10.31 but no sats West of 45.






Ok, I’ll just start keying in some of my sats, but now I discover I can not specify a existing sat position in my G-box. The Gekko just assigns the next unused number and overwrites the one in the G-box. This will make testing this box and then returning to my equipment quite a job as I have 63 sat positions to re-locate.

Saturday, April 14


The updated software fixed the blind scan. It is now comparable to my OpenBox S-9. I am starting to find my around the menus now. I had been looking for a one button push to bring up the sat list. Found it today by pressing “favorites”. I also like the channel page that acts as “satellite Central”. It has a small picture of the present channel and while that stays up you can highlight other channels in the list and info about the channel is displayed in a box to the right. Nice for searching for a channel that has scanned in with a plain name. (ex. Ch. 1)





Tuesday, April 17

I tried using some of the PVR functions today. The manual, written in Hungarian with English and Romanian sections is actually quite good and helpful. Reading it I was easily able to make a live recording, and a timed recording. The timed recording has a brief “start message” then drops off instead of leaving an annoying bug on the screen. Play back is smooth with no jumping or freezing the way the OpenBox and some other receivers do. Nice clear picture, no pixelazition. Almost as good as a TiVo.


Wednesday, April 18

I'm having a bit of trouble deleting old TPs, so I am working on that. Probably just the wrong menu.
Meanwhile I thought I'd mention one of the guys was having trouble getting CanalLuz HD (12076V, 4000SR, 3/4 8PSK) at 30.0


Saturday, April 28

I did some testing over the past few days with the Gekko connected to my main system of dishes, switches, and motors. It was able to handle a cascade of DiSEqC 1.0, 1.1, and Zinwell switches. Also in my system are DiSEqC 1.2 G-box and V-box controlling actuators on my 8ft. C-band dish and 1.2m Ku. Another dish has a USALS motor. All this can be operated by the Gekko. Switching from one service to another is as easy as surfing cable channels.

I opened up the Gekko to take a look under the hood. There is not much in there. The main processor (under the heat sink) is the only component that gets quite warm, but not hot. The rest of the board runs cool.





Not much marked on the tuner as to make or model. However it sure does work well pulling in signals my OpenBox skips over.





Also comparing to my OpenBox and Manhattan that sometimes stutter or freeze, the Gekko plays channels like eScapes, NBC 103 Ku, and the Canadian services on 107 C without problems. Even though the Gekko specs list on board memory at 256meg, a closer look inside reveals a pair of Hynix H5PS1G63EFR chips for and incredible 2 gigabytes of SD RAM.





I tested the Gekko's lnb output by loading it with a variable power resistor up to maximum rating. It held a steady 18v. @ 400ma. for over an hour without heating up. Even the external power pack only got mildly warm.





I ran a test of radio services. 99w C has several channels that come in fine. I then tried service from 139w C, over 400 channels scanned in, many are AAC audio, the others are mpeg, but none would play. Not sure why, but I have no problem getting these services with my OpenBox.


CONCLUSION

The Gekko has a great steady picture in the HDMI mode, scans in even low bit rate channels. The scanned channels have extra information I haven't seen on other receivers such as actual channel name instead of obscure numbers. The information screen has details of who the up linker is, type of encoding, and pids.

AV output... just can't find a kind thing to say about this. I had a Sony camcorder cable that fit the mini jack output, but the video comes out of the white RCA connector instead of the traditional yellow. The audio has a bit of hum, wiggling the mini jack minimized this somewhat. The picture on a SD television is lousy, and so is the HDMI picture in the 480i mode. Something not right about these protocols. There is no video output from the av jack when the Gekko is set to higher picture rates like 1080i, unlike the OpenBox or Manhattan that can output duel video modes simultaneously. You can find yourself locked out, blind to re-set it.

DiSEqC 1.2 sat positions are automatically assigned by the Gekko. I would like to see the ability to key these in manualy, especially for connecting to a positioner box already calibrated to your actual sat positions. The Gekko is currently limited to 58 stored positions, I need 63 and would like to add more. Lack of ability to add or delete satellites should be fixed. You can only edit existing sats or use the generous 4 extra blank positions they give you.

The blind scan is slow, it spends a lot of time looking at blank spectrum or or TPs with scrambled channels. However I must say it is quite thorough, rarely skipping over something. May be worth the time for the accuracy.


I would also like to see a hard off power switch instead of yanking out the power jack.

If they can address some of the above I think we have a good, very small receiver.



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