Transponder Standard & SR
10762 HL
27500
10845 HL
27500
10928 HL
30000
10972 VL
27500
11010 VL
27500
11045 HL
10555
11054 HL
2894
11131 VL
14815
11177 VL
27500
11220 HL
30000
11231 VL
30000
11283 VL
27500
11324 VL
30000
11345 HL
27500
11366 VL
30000
11386 HL
30000
11470 HL
30000
11470 VL
29950
11512 HL
30000
11553 HL
30000
11595 HL
30000
11678 HL
30000
12508 VH
2532
12593 VH
2500
12596 VH
2848
12600 VH
2500
12605 HH
27500
12633 VH
4883
12656 VH
4883
12676 HH
2800
12736 VH
3703
80
TELE-audiovision International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 07-08/2013
—
covers to protect the cable-
to-LNB connection against
rainand moisture. The bot-
tom part of the quad version
is protractile to ensure a sim-
ilar level of rain protection for
all four outputs. Finally, there
are small scales on the top
surface of the LNBs what help
the installer in setting up the
proper LNB tilt.
Before starting the meas-
urements we had to choose
to which satellite turn our 85
cm offset dish. We thought
we make it really hard for
these LNBs to see what hap-
pens when we go to the limit.
For our test we selected the
EUTELSAT16A on 16° East.
Why? Because this satellite
has very strong neighbors:
ASTRA on 19.2° East and
HOTBIRD on 13° East. More-
over, EUTELSAT16A has not
only high symbol rate tran-
sponders but also weaker
transponders with low sym-
bol rates. The lowest SR was
2500 ks/sec. The table lists
all the transponders we used
for testing the single and
quad LNBs.
As a reference LNB we
decided for a very good low
noise LNB of another manu-
facturer. Only the best prod-
ucts on the market can match
its performance and now we
were curious if HUMAX really
was able to get close to it.
We started our test with
the single and quad LNBs of
HUMAX: model numbers LNB
113 and LNB 142. We came
to our first surprise: all HU-
MAX LNBs beat our reference
in signal strength. The quad
version model LNB 142 even
stood out by length: it per-
formed even 5 dB better than
our reference unit! That‘s
something important to con-
sider, especially when you
use long cables or antenna
switches that attenuate the
signal.
We proceeded to measure
signal quality. As usually, for
this we used the Modulation
Error Ratio (MER) parameter
as our metrics.
The results here were not
so obvious. Using sports ter-
minology, we would say that
the HUMAX LNBs tied with
our reference. For some tran-
sponders our reference LNB
was slightly better, for some
other transponders models
LNB 113 or LNB 142 were
the winners. One sample of
the LNB 142 (marked brown
in our table) performed not
so well for 12596VH and
12600VH low symbol rate
transponders (2848 and
2500 ks/sec respectively).
However, another sample of
the same LNB 142 model was
better than our reference for
