Manhattan: ST100 Plaza

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Derek Weir on April 20th, 2006
This machine is driving me nuts, I am trying to get Eurosport at 11953 H 27500 3/4 on the ZDF transponder on Astra 1 @ 19.2E and the bloody thing just won't pick it up, Manhattan themselves haven't replied and the seller just told me what I already know

Orbitalzone, South East England on June 30th, 2005
I've had the Manhattan ST100 Plaza Free To Air digital satellite receiver for a month now and thought I'd add my comments on it. It's well made and the remote control isn't that bad for a budget price item. This unit gets warm like most receivers, so allow for ventilation. It has no slots for CAMS or any other decoding things, so it really is only suitable for the Free to air broadcasts although I think they do other versions that do feature CAM slots. This model has a flap that opens on the front to reveal 3 blanked holes, there is nothing behind the blanking plates though, so I don't think any hacking would upgrade this to decode scrambled channels. Onscreen menus are clear and fairly simple for anyone, auto tuning is easy and sorting channels is no big deal, 5000 channel capacity seems daft but when you tune in Hotbird at 13e and Astra at 19e you soon use up many hundreds there, it will tune in scrambled channels too, but can be instructed to only tune FTA channels if required. It has blind search for real SatDX'ing (when you're searching for channels that don't use standard settings) It has 2 scarts with RGB and composite outputs and S-Video via a 4pin socket (no SVideo via scart) and also audio output RCA sockets. The one annoying problem for me is that using this receiver with my Sony KV28FX20 widescreen TV, the receiver 'forces' my TV into the 14/9 viewing mode whenever viewing regular 4/3 programs. I can reset my TV to 4/3 mode and all is well until I turn off and start again. It does this via scart and RF connections. Manhattan / Eurosat don't acknowledge this as a known fault and it probably only affects some widescreen TV's. It's a minor quirk and not a problem. Another DS member has found this happens too. This happens regardless of whether you set the receiver to output in 4/3 mode or 16/9 mode! (16/9 mode works fine for 'true' widescreen transmissions by the way) All in all, for someone who wants to pick up hundreds of free to air digital channels this is a good choice, so far no glitches or freezeups, seems to work with low sat signals well and there are over the air updates on Hotbird 13e once in a while (or via website/RS232 pc link) I'd give it 8 out of 10 and recommend it.