Octagon SF8008 Supreme

Appreciate the offer...... but, after many attempts to contact customer service and tech support with absolutely no response, I returned the unit. Too bad though, construction quality was very good for the price level of the unit.

If it had worked well with the SF8008, would have been a good project to connect two or three units to the receiver and report the blind scan and dvr recording capabilities.
 
In regards to the Sf8008 from another site....

New version V3 returns to the Silabs tuner, the same as V1.

Wash, rinse, repeat.....

A 3 or 4 tuner version would be nice....
 
Wash, rinse, repeat.....That is what we have had for enigma2 fta receivers in the last 5 years or longer.

The receivers have rs232 connections on them. Seems you should be able to connect a pair of receivers together using rs232 and have the pair act as a single receiver. Seems this should be possible. I think it would take manufacturers support to do it so don't look for it to happen.

And the new GigaBlue Quad Pro for use in North America would be more or less junk. We cannot really use FBC tuners, plus the sensitivity of the FBC tuners seems to be down a bit. And no satellite blindscan --even though the receiver is advertised with satellite blindcsan. The GigaBlue Shills say blindscan exists with optional tuners that do not yet exist, but the receiver specs do not mention optional tuners are needed for satellite blindscan. Definitely a junk fta satellite receiver for us in its current state. Good Luck getting GigaBlue to fix anything. Also usb tuners are not supported, so no atsc capabilities either. Junk....
 
Did a software update to 03-19-2025 and it resulted in a very nice zap speed increase on 87 ku. Zapping speed between c and ku sats are very good too.

Randomly blind scanned 105 ku with good results.

Manually downloading TNAP-6-sf8008-20250319_multiboot.zip from Tnap site was very fast.
 
I've been working with the SF8008 Supreme, As Eastof111 noted these STBs run pretty hot. And in the summer it gets hot in the house a bit. Adding the M.2 SSD increases the heat. I recently purchased some fans for the security DVRs I have. 40x40x10mm and found them to be a nice fit for the SF8008. CPU temp steady at 41°C

OctagonSupreme.webp
 
eastof111 said:
It's a small heat sink, just dropped and sitting on top of the original. I've got more intel sinks sitting in the garage which I will find later and see how far down I can get the temp to drop without using a fan.

View attachment 18075
Click to expand...

Eastof111, looking at your picture I noticed the SSD retaining screw is not installed properly. Understandable with the lame setup they have. That washer is not a washer but actually a spacer that belongs under the SSD. Most M.2 slots I have encountered have a special retaining screw with a built in spacer that holds the drive correctly.
 
Sharp eye there..... old habits of using a washer never seem to die... I've long corrected that mistake and also replaced the heat sink with a larger one I found in the surplus bin.

Thx for catching and pointing out the error.
 
It's nice to see there are some hardware geeks out there. My osmio4k has had a small speed regulated pc fan in it forever.

I was just given the specs for the latest SF8008 that is apparently being sold on Amazon.de. Not actually quite ready to grab another receiver just yet. But that mio will die some day.
It's a difficult decision to just bite the bullet and grab a TBS card and stream using BDA. Still in preschool on all that crap. I guess until you have a DVB card in your hands. You know....

Some post back it was mentioned that nobody cares as long as they sell sell sell. Perhaps?
So how would a person explain the different drivers for the AVL chips that were glued to the rabbits the guys pulled out of hats?
I mean. Not many people in this "hobby" thing have forty-seven drivers for anything. Right?

I read a little snippet of something here of a Ustym driver in an Octagon image. The Ustym always had the 2166 tuner? And Octagon has been swapping between different ones through different SF8008 versions?

For us it's all about blindscan blindcan blindscan. Being able to snag those low sr tp's and locking onto wild feeds like a boss.
Oh yeah. And the futile 4:2:2 subject done 'in the box'.
I always though you didn't want to use an SSD for sequential read/writes. I use a WD Video HDD scarfed from a DN DVR. I really don't care about an M.2 slot to be honest.

FBC is out. Multistream is still confusing as hell. More and more blindscans turn up more and more t2mi transponders. Some that have complete populated lines in the xml. and some not.

If a brotha' were to choose a new box. Broadcom or Hisilicon? AVL6261 or Si2166? Bottim line. From a developers point of view and seat of the pants personal experiences?
And is there one single driver for the Si2166 compared to the AVL6261?
 
You've asked pretty much the same questions about receivers and cards for years, but you never buy them. Anyway, let's see if we can shed some light on these fta receiver mysteries once and for all.

Almost all fta receivers made today are manufactured in China. A manufacturer orders a quantity of receivers, the line starts up and receivers are produced. Towards the end of the production line, the make and model of the receiver is added such as Octagon, GigaBlue, Ustym...etc. The components inside these different receiver brands are either identical or almost identical. The manufacturer then distributes the receivers to the various warehouses of Octagon, GigaBlue, Ustym...etc. In other words, They are all pretty much the same damn receiver.

There has not been a "new" fta enigma2 receiver produced in almost a decade. All we are seeing today is variants of older receivers. The Linux kernels, the chipsets, demodulators, and tuners are all new old stock. Nothing new, except maybe some wifi upgrades and storage upgrades, plus a few other small things.

Octagon, GigaBlue, and Ustym all released receivers around 8 years ago with SiLabs SI2166D demodulators (also called tuners). Then in 2023-2024, the same or almost identical receivers were released with AVL62X1 demodulators. Now the same group or almost the same group of receivers is back again with the original SI2166D SiLabs demodulator for 2025. The same 4.4.35 kernel is being usexd along with the same drivers.

Receivers like the ones mentioned above have very lazy production coders. They simply install all of the needed drivers into a .ko package and let the receiver pick what it needs, depending on demodulator type. This is very common practice and is found in other receivers that have Boradcom chipsets.

Neither Broadcom nor Hisilicon is making a new system on chip (soc). This pretty much means it is the end of the line for fta receivers until a new or different chip maker shows up. These are not the only chip makers out there. Until something changes, all you are seeing is pretty much New Old Stock.

Receiver specs are usually a mixed bags of truths and wishful thinking. The "new" GigaBlue Quad Pro has specs listed that are not true or at best misleading like satellite blindscan. Official Octagon specs for their latest and greatest SF8008 version 3 is shown below.

https://www.octagon-germany.eu/prod...iver/satellit-dvb-s2/sf8008_v3_supreme_combo/
 
el bandido said:
You've asked pretty much the same questions about receivers and cards for years, but you never buy them. Anyway, let's see if we can shed some light on these fta receiver mysteries once and for all.
Click to expand...
el bandido said:
Let's think about this one for a sec. I can take a butt-peeling probably better than most. When justified. Yup. I've asked exactly what you mention above. And researched well before feeling the need to. Thing is. Although perhaps a gadget freak. I don't have too much useless crap hanging out. Test equipment, spec. analyzers. A quality vintage stereo system in every room. A cool ham radio collection.
The guys on Ricks offered some great help in choosing a TBS card. There are DeTek broadcast quality cards and tons of others. Since TBS card seems to be the hot ticket to satisfy my hobby neeeds. And since the best of the best from hands on usage was listed. Now I've been hunting for it for the right price because it's a bit out of my budget. So instant gratification leads to "buy once, cry once".
I bought an Apple TV back when I read about being able to put Kodi on them. Oops. Wrong version. And got sent out of town past when the return policy expired.
And that damned Zgemma H7.AC that I bought from Tek. You know all about that. Blindscan my ass. By the time I learned enough about sat receivers. Besides being a douche. I got stuck with it.
Did you send that...what was it?....Dreambox One back to Portugal when you found out how big of a bummer it was? Shame. If you knew its real capabilities and if it was able to perform beforehand. Things I do before making a purchase. You can pick the tiny daggers out over that one. I ain't pissed. I am damned picky of the stuff I get to satisfy my hobbies and profession.

Almost all fta receivers made today are manufactured in China. A manufacturer orders a quantity of receivers, the line starts up and receivers are produced. Towards the end of the production line, the make and model of the receiver is added such as Octagon, GigaBlue, Ustym...etc. The components inside these different receiver brands are either identical or almost identical. The manufacturer then distributes the receivers to the various warehouses of Octagon, GigaBlue, Ustym...etc. In other words, They are all pretty much the same damn receiver.

Yeah. Schenzhen must be a trip to visit much work in. All of that Amazon crap with names like Happy Yung and Rot Snag, Brow-Runch. Cloned electronics. Or is that crowned-electlonics? My friend was one of the head engineers for David Sarnoff and The Grand Alliance when HDTV was being developed in the 3rd floor basement of NBC in Washington. He had a list of specs. Submitted them to AT&T, Motorola and others. And after a period received black boxes to do the task that was commissioned. He self-professed that he didn't know what was going on inside of them. Just that a signal went in and a signal came out. Ya' think that's what Broadcom, Huawei....Hilisicon does? A manufactuer inquires. A product brief is sent out. And Gerbers, BOM, code to run it all is packaged up for manufaturing. And a big eff-you, pay me seals the deal?
Again. What about the Availink drivers? Were they always sitting in the company archives or did Edision or them personally get involved in addressing the wants and needs and deficiencies?
Where the hell did you (or your team) get all of those drivers from and how? And is the Si driver the one and only one for the DVB tuner/demod. IC?
Because I received mine directly from Edision.gr. Something like 6-8 different ones to try and evaluate. Most slow as molasses. Others skipping right past the task.

Receivers like the ones mentioned above have very lazy production coders. They simply install all of the needed drivers into a .ko package and let the receiver pick what it needs, depending on demodulator type. This is very common practice and is found in other receivers that have Boradcom chipsets.

Goes back to the package deal and "warranty" or tweaking period in the contract to develop the actual software that makes it tick. We'll write code and license you for 10,000 units and support for 10 months. Then it's eff-you pay me after that, Joe.

Neither Broadcom nor Hisilicon is making a new system on chip (soc). This pretty much means it is the end of the line for fta receivers until a new or different chip maker shows up. These are not the only chip makers out there. Until something changes, all you are seeing is pretty much New Old Stock.

Well it is a SDR world now. Don't forget that. With FPGA, I/Q. Who knows. You're very aware of the things being done purely in software right now. Things could turn into a PC, Raspberry Pi. As is very much the case of the cheap RTL TV dongles with software like SDR# and DSD+. A SOC may not even be needed at all in any future RF device. At all.

Receiver specs are usually a mixed bags of truths and wishful thinking. The "new" GigaBlue Quad Pro has specs listed that are not true or at best misleading like satellite blindscan. Official Octagon specs for their latest and greatest SF8008 version 3 is shown below.

Sails us RIGHT BACK to the first paragraph and your comment. YouTube content creators are constantly given products from manufactures to try. Some can be biased towards the specific products and tout them as the cat's ass. Because a good share of their revenue comes from those manufacturers. Others are simply sent things to try out and review and give an honest hands-on opinion. While others take their revenue and just buy the stuff to tear it to pieces and say "This is cool". Or "This will kill you".
But. Some products are not covered or manufacturer only specifications are given. So the misleading things you listed above are quite sad to see. Things that can be a deal breaker for an application that turn out to be pure bee-ess.
So. Why the hell would a person NOT ask about a particular product? And further. Once their "feet are wet" knowing more from a good idea or personal experience of ownership of a said product. Query the masses of what is the best of the best for the price. Buy once, cry once.
Yeah.

Be well. I have a skin graft appointment. Seems like the peelers attacked me.

https://www.octagon-germany.eu/prod...iver/satellit-dvb-s2/sf8008_v3_supreme_combo/
Click to expand...

Good stuff. How much is actually true? Time will tell.
 
Flashed on line with TNAP-6-sf8008-20250403_multiboot.zip. Used auto restore and net speed test missing from prior setup. In plugins extensions or system plugins, speed test not available. Did a software update and no speed test plugins available.

Had to manually install the v. 1.8 ipk file and now speed test working fine.
 
Post the .ipk that you think works best and I will put it on the feeds. Also, OE Alliance plugins will work, depending on file structure. BoxBranding is installed and working in TNAP6-0403.
 
Back
Top