The Technosat TS 1500 HD Plus Free To Air Satellite Decoder Review

Technosat have a reputation of designing and building very good receivers that are rugged in design and most importantly very easy to use, I mean the user friendliness of Technosat decoders is second to none. The photo above is of a Technosat TS-1500 HD decoder free to air satellite receiver. From its name, you can tell that it’s a HD decoder. To top it up these are some of its most important features.

It’s a full HD MPEG 4 decoder
Blind scan capability
Supports USB 2.0 PVR (personal video recorder)
DiSEqC version 1.1 capable

These are the most important features at least to me. 

The decoder itself is black in colour and something quite different about this decoder is that the illuminated display is red in colour. Another very important feature is that the Technosat 1500 HD Plus has all the essential control buttons on the decoder itself. I mean apart from the usual Standby and Channel UP and DOWN buttons it has the volume control buttons as well as the menu and OK button. So if the remote control batteries run out of power and you live in the middle of nowhere, you will still do that blind scan with no problem at all.

Another interesting feature about this decoder is the fact that the front panel that hides the USB port opens up like a normal door towards the left instead of opening downwards like a pick up trucks tailgate or should I say boot. This function can make a clumsy person or child break the plastic cover or even the USB stick, if it’s inserted.

The menu user interface is a dull grey in colour and it’s quite a challenge to select some features on the Dish installation menu. It also takes some time to get used to selecting a satellite name and assigning it a DiSEqC port. I might have compromised my statement earlier saying that Technosat builds very user friendly decoders.

The decoder highlights any HD channel with a bright green HD icon when you press the OK button and the list of available channels is displayed. It does not however show if a particular channel is an Mpeg 4 or Mpeg 2.  The channels are all classified as being SD (standard definition) channels.

The blind scan feature allows a viewer to discover transponder frequencies that have not yet been updated on lyngsat or flysat. The blind scan feature is also important for discovering feeds on satellite. Some feeds usually carry important Premier league games on an unscrambled medium. Apart from the blind scan feature the decoder also has the Satellite scan feature that scans all frequencies saved on the decoder’s satellite list. 

The DiSEqC 1.1 version allows connection of up to 16 satellite inputs using a 16×1 DiSEqC switch. If the 16X1 switch is not available, then the 8X1 switch can also be used. The decoder also has the 1.0 version also that supports only four satellite inputs using a 4X1 switch. The ability to connect it to multiple satellite inputs increases the number of free to air satellite channels for a world of entertainment.

Now these are the things that I did not like about this decoder.

Unusual blind scan
The Technosat TS 1500 HD scans all the available transponders first. It takes about 8 minutes to do this Transponder scanning. After this the decoder then again starts scanning from 0 percent the channels on the already scanned transponders. This takes about another 5 minutes. The channels that pop up do not have the dollar sign to show if they are scrambled. To know if a particular channel is scrambled, then you will have to wait for the process to finish and surf the channels using the remote control after pressing the OK button. I might add that the Technosat t-888 plus ultra Mpeg 2 decoder has a much better blind scan feature.

Missing signal quality level meter
The only thing that is available is only one signal quality bar that fluctuates between a high and low level if the signal is unstable. The bar is of un-uniform colors and is not any good. A good decoder will show the signal intensity and quality meters with the percentages at the end. This is very useful for comparison of weak, stable and strong signals.
Also notably missing from this decoder is the satellite finder beeper that is usually very useful in the inferior Technosat T-888 decoder.