Your BATC Minitiouner V2 can actually tune and demodulate to two different signals at the same time. This wasn’t really something that has been used before since its not really a requirement for Terrestrial DATV signals, but this is something that could be very handy when using it with the QO-100 Satellite wideband transponder.
To make this modification you need to add another USB module to the your Minitiouner. You can either DIY this, or make use of the simple daughterboard that can be assembled using this PCB available in the BATC shop. You can find more information/schematic on the PCB here or in CQ-TV issue 264, Page 17.
Here is an example of a DIY version made by Benno (PA3FBX)
He has used this board on both the BATC V2 Minitiouner and the Minitiouner-S from the French REF Ham community. Information on modifying Minitiouner-S is available here.
Once you have assembled your transport daughter board you need to reprogram the module with different description strings. This allows the software to detect which module provides the 2nd transport stream. This is easily done using software called FT_PROG and the this template file.
Note: It is recommended that you only plug in the device you want to program, remove the rest so that you don’t accidently reprogram any other ftdi devices.
The steps to program your usb module is as follow:
- Plug in your usb module and select Devices->Scan and Parse. This will detect and load the information from your plugged in usb module.
- Open the xml template file downloaded above.
- Right click on your device in the tree and select Apply Template
- Lastly select Program from the Devices menu item and click on the program button.
- Unplug your module and plug it back in again for the new values to be used.
Last piece you need is the latest version of Open Tuner (Dual Tuner supported from Version 0.7 – 2023/04/27).
If all goes well then Open Tuner will detect the 2nd device and you should now have access to two different tuners that can be independently tuned and viewed.
If you have any issues then can report them on the Open Tuner BATC Forum and remember to include as much information as possible including the ftdi detection logs in the terminal.
Please also share any pictures of your modified BATC Minitiouner V2 🙂
