C-KO DVBT-1080 Mobile Digital TV Receiver

This is a box you will never need to see again once it’s connected to your mobile A/V system (you will need a screen) but may well be the one thing you use the most, as it is a true mobile-adapted DVBT receiver of TV signals. DVBT stands for Digital Video Broadcasting, Terrestrial, as against Satellite. It is how anyone without a dish but rather an ordinary TV aerial watches TV in their homes. However, TV signals, unlike FM radio ones were never intended for use in a moving vehicle and the standard is essentially one of static reception. So going mobile with TV is a challenge. This unit has two Panasonic digital TV tuners inside (the C-KO guys are proud of using a top quality tuner module) and each is constantly scanning the airwaves for clear TV signals. Even the very best tuner can only tune in to what is actually there. It’s the extra electronics in the box that handle signals and sort programmes that make this a mobile device. The tuners and associated signal-sorting and sensing electronics form a system that’s intended to offer up only those channels which can be viewed at your location and whilst on the move. There are lots of inputs and outputs, including an RS232 port for later software updates. Thus it can be used as an A/V hub much like a home TV set. The unit comes as a deal with two aerials as well. Internal glass mount types, they are active in that the Panasonic tuners supply power to them to amplify the signal. The 1080 comes with a chunky and ergonomically satisfying remote control and a generously long and healthily thick wire loom to allow installation anywhere you want to put it. You get an ‘eye’ on the unit’s chassis for use by an installer but the main operation will be via the remote eye socket with the wired IR receiver to point the remote control at. This too is on a generously long wire so you can put the tuner in the boot but point the remote at the screen as you are used to, by placing the receptor nearby. The headunit used to supply the screen by way of its own A/V input was a Necvox HQ2 single DIN with motorised screen. It has a good resolution and allowed a review of the tuner’s reception quality. It was tried static parked and then in a few locations that are fed by different television transmitters.
– Tuner by Panasonic, supplies 5V to antennae
– Automatic Frequency Switch searches for best signal
– Designed to work with C-KO OEM system interfaces
– Frequency Range: UHF 470 to 860 MHz
– Two A/V inputs on composite Video/Stereo RCA
– Two channel RCA stereo output
– Three composite Video outputs
– S-Video Output
– RS232 port
– Two antenna input sockets
– Infra red receptor LED in chassis
– Included wired Infra Red Remote Eye for socket on chassis
– Full 8 day Electronic Programme Guide and OSD
– 34 Button Remote Control unit
– Dimensions: (WxHxD) 230mm x 150mm x 30mm
– Power Molex plug supplied with extensive wire loom
– C/W trilingual manual, batteries for remote and steel mounting furniture
– Deal includes 2x ADSC 450 TV antennae for use inside car screen (£59.99 per pair if separate)
Review by Adam Rayner
When Smoky & The Bandit was a cool film, we were all on illegal CB radios from America broadcasting happily on AM and interfering with taxi firms and folks’ TV signals. All that was talked about was radio transmission and what rig you had. Some took the exams and became genuine radio hams. But the twig that gave you god like status amongst CB-ers was the mighty Sigma Four. A big stick with a little ring around it part way up. For one it went ‘LAAAAAAAH!’ very loudly as it was a VERY big stick and for another, it reached out like a bitch as it was ‘loaded’ by the ring thing.
This made the same amount of energy pouring out of the aerial (‘Hello, Guam.?’) go from a spherical shape to a doughnut or toroid. Imagine me sitting on a part inflated space hopper. Now, after the mind bleach moment, see in your mind’s eye, the circumference of the space hopper. it bulges out sideways, doesn’t it? Well, the same thing is done with TV transmitters for terrestrial as against satellite TV. We live on a hillside on the edge of London with a fabulous view looking out over Hertfordshire. You can see the Hemel Hempstead transmitter in the near distance. It looks like you could reach out and scratch it. It doesn’t even have to be a clear night to see all three aeroplane warning lights on it after dark. In the other direction, you crest the hill and you can see the whole of the London Basin from Stanmore Hill. On a clear day you can see the Crystal Palace TV transmitter tower sticking up like a tiny Eiffel on the horizon.
And at home, our TV reception is rubbish because we ‘Live on a mountain’. It means we are above the altitude of the stretched out toroid of telly from Hemel. Where we live some homes’ aerials point one way and others at Crystal Palace! It makes our home really good to test TV sets out at. I have a TV PVR box and a Panasonic Viera Plasma which I adore and while the Panny has a sexier picture with more sensitivity to a less than excellent signal the Thompson PVR HDD in a box system has a slightly softer picture but can tune and hold all the farther-out stuff like Dave Ja Vu.
So after Tony Rook from Automotive Styling (the distributors of C-KO kit) arrived with one to look at and lick and one installed in his car, we parked outside at first.
Right away I can tell you that the C-KO DVBT-1080 tuner beats the one Mercedes use for stock nine ways from zero. Fairly recently I had the use of a 500SL. All £98,000 worth of it, fully loaded. It had a TV tuner in its system but apart from the fact that it was wired to work only when parked for OEM politics reasons, it was poor even then unless you shuffled your car to tune it. The C-KO’s picture and channel selection was impressive from outside my front door, though. So after a moment’s viewing, I had Tony ferry us down the hill, initially into a better reception zone and then into the shadow of the houses.
The thing held on and even kept a decent selection of channels, adding a dozen as we went down the hill. But then I asked to drive down to Harrow. As we went I gather the device was tuning and questing busily for as we asked it to change channel, it suddenly had a choice of lots. I was impressed and then asked to be driven up to Old Redding. It’s a Lovers Lookout car park, known for skunk, dogging and an amazing view as far as the air allows. Planes in lines queuing up for Heathrow and that Crystal Palace transmitter in line of sight.
The two aerials in Tony’s car tuned into more channels than I can get at my home with a big high cost high gain aerial neatly aimed! We got 106 TV channels and 74DVBT Radio channels. Of those, the 1080 was happy to display 38 of them, with others deemed not strong enough to work in the car. So, you are limited a bit but the point is that instead of the familiar experience of totally hopeless fuzzing in and out and the odd word perhaps being intelligible with moving TV systems you might have actually tried, this thing actually works while you are going along.
It cannot pull in a signal better than two small on glass active twigs can muster and you are a lot lower down than the average TV aerial gets to sit on a house roof but what it does is remarkable and it really works. Far better than any TV tuner for car use I have ever seen, even the On Screen Display is well designed for mobile use with only four channels at a time showing on the selection, so as to make it simple to use on a smaller screen. It does have a de-rigueur ‘handbrake’ wire to comply with political correctness but you can easily wire it so that your passenger CAN watch east Enders on the way back from the weekly supermarket trip.
Well made, easy to use and install, amazingly clever at what it does and for opening up the whole world of TV at last in a properly useful rather than hopelessly compromised sort of a way to us car users, it even represents good value as well. Don’t forget you are getting TWO tuner and all the stuff needed to make them work for your ride. Scores lots and wins a Talk Audio Best Buy.
Watch the BBC Breakfast show on BBC One long enough in the mornings and you might even be at risk of catching me talking ‘Motoring Journalist’ on your drive to work.