Tevion/Technosonic Twin Tuner PVR

Build your own PVR for Under a Tenner

When I heard about these kits I was a bit skeptical as to exactly what I would end up with at the price, but when my Technosonic PVR 101 kit arrived I was pleasantly surprised. The unit came in a plain wrapper with minimum screws securing the top cover, on top of the case were taped a quantity of screws to fix it more securely. Removing the top revealed a mint interior with an empty mounting bracket in the center for the hard drive, this is all that appears to be needed to get the unit up & running. I had an 80gig hard drive going spare & I installed it, first making sure it was set to master with it's jumpers. There were 4 screws needed to mount the drive onto the bracket, the 40 way ribbon cable and molex power cable were obvious how to connect, the bracket was then screwed down into the base of the unit with a further 4 screws (all of 5 mins work). Screw the top back on and connect the power, fit the batteries in the supplied remote, connect the aerial, connect the scart lead to the TV and I was ready to go. DAM! no signal! I had overlooked the fact that "Freeview" Digital was not due in my area until 2011. Not to be outdone my granddaughter lives just 10 miles away and she can receive limited Freeview so it was time for a visit.
The visit to my granddaughter was welcomed and after playing with my 3 year old great-grandson with his ride on Thomas the Tank Engine we had a very nice Lasagna prepared & cooked by my granddaughter much nicer than the supermarket microwave ones I am used to. Back to the PVR. Connecting up to the aerial and TV scart still received no signal but after quick check with the manual I was able to do an automatic scan to find the necessary channels. The signal from the indoor aerial was a bit week and some of the stations were choppy but I was able to view & record Heartbeat, and as this unit has a twin tuner I was able to view & record another channel simultaneously. Time slip is possible if recording just one channel (playback earlier parts of the recording whilst still recording). The 7 day EPG available on "Freeview" enables advanced selection of programs to record and should enable recording all of your favorite soaps whilst away on holiday and with an 80 gig HD there is over 50 hours recording time. Apart from the poor signal due to inadequate aerial the unit performed very well and the following day I played back my recordings via my 40" TV and they compared favorably with my SKY box output. The connections on the back are Scart VCR IN/OUT Scart TV OUT RGB & Composite 2x RCA Coax Digital Audio Out RCA Composite Video RCA Analogue Audio L & R Coaxial Aerial Input Coaxial Aerial Output loop-through Power Isolator Switch (not to be confused with standby) These units come with various firmware's and mine has v2.2, unfortunately the firmware can only be upgraded over the air and a time slot is allocated for this. my unit has an rs232 header on the main board to enable connection to a PC for manual upgrade but so far I have been unable to locate any firmware or software to be able to carry this out. These units are for receiving and recording the digital signals from "Freeview" only and are unsuitable for recording from terrestrial TV or from a SKY receiver but as a "Freeview" box at under a tenner they work very well.

Added:  March 5th 2008
Reviewer:  Flash
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