TechniSat has a reputation for making great budget satellite PC cards. Grand Rennell sees if its latest DTT card lives up to the promise.

Technisat's Skystar 2 PVR card proved to be an inexpensive and reliable satellite PC card with some great software
bundled in, rightly garnering first place in our Hardware Awards last issue. The Airstar 2 is a digital terrestrial PCI card (Sat Europa also sells a USB box equivalent) based on the same B2CE chipset as the Skystar and coming with much the same software. So, does it deserve the same praise?

Neither the box or card come with a remote control, although Sat Europa will sell you one for an extra £19. There's no common interface slot for potential use with Top-Up TV either. Predictably for a budget card, connections are also fairly streamlined. You won't find inputs suitable for video-capturing from an external source, but the handy inclusion of a UHF output alongside the aerial input means the card can be used to output programmes to a TV or record them using a VCR.

Installing the card is a straightforward, hasslefree process, and operating it is just as easy using two separate applications - Setup4PC and the DVB viewer. Setup4PC is where the basic tuning and retuning takes place, though you can also locate channels from within the DVB viewer. Located channels are listed in the Program (sic) management
menu, where you can rename them and manually tweak technical info including PIDs.

The Status menu is where, among other things, you can check signal quality for individual channels and which transmitter you are receiving. The Airstar 2's tuner made an efficient job of locating all available channels in our average signal area. The job of watching and recording them is handled by the excellent DVB viewer. The version bundled here lacks a few features such as DVD playback and the ability to pause and resume live TV, though a modest £10 outlay
will buy you the full version of the software from the DVB viewer website (www.dvbviewer.com) which does include these.

The Channel list can be used to scan for channels, which are listed by provider and can also be renamed. The EPG lists TV and radio channels on the left-hand side with now-and-next info for the selected channel on the right.

Recording is handled in three different ways. You can click on the manual record icon on the main screen and there's a manual timer option, but the simplest option for scheduling a recording is by clicking on a programme in the EPG and selecting 'send to PVR', which adds the programme to the timer list.

The DVB viewer records in broadcast quality MPEG2 (around 1.7GB of space is required an hour) and the viewer can be set to automatically split recordings when you reach a specified file size - useful if you intend to copy a programme
on to disc.

There's a choice of 4:3, letterboxed 16:9 and 14:9 aspect ratios, together with three levels of zoom a full-screen option, and a desktop TV mode which has the viewer running in the background as a 'wallpaper' replacement.

Picture quality is exceptionally crisp, and the card ran very smoothly on the test PC (an Athlon 2100XP with 512MB RAM).

Although the lack of a timeshifting option does undermine the PVR tag slightly, if you're looking for a simple, value-for-money method of recording and watching of DTT channels on your PC, then the Airstar 2 fits the bill.

Published June 2004, What Satellite & Digital TV