Quote Originally Posted by stuge
Thanks for the info Thomson, and for the palmod ..um.. mod!

I still am not having any joy getting the tuner to work properly. I can't add-whole-channel, despite being able to see the fta TV channels by pressing the numbers on the remote. I keep getting my hopes up only to have them dashed by:
Reading the forums, this is because I have already had a channel associated with that unique id and it can't be reused. Fair enough but it doesn't really help me. Recommendation to go through TiVo "System Reset", "Clear and Delete Everything" works to free up the unique id but then I need to start again with a guided setup screen. So I avoid guided setup and go straight to opening a bash prompt, as per Tim's How-to. Now the fta chanels won't show up at all and I have a white line at the top of my screen.

It appears that our Oz friends can opt for fta channels through their emulator. Is this the solution to my problems? I am almost ready to admit PAL tuner defeat, get into bed with the devil and get Sky. Anyone here had success with a PAL modded US tivo, I would be keen to hear how you did it.

Next stop for me - reimage the disk to start from scatch.
Heres a possible trick you can use.
to "create a channel" on your Tivo for each FTA station you can get tune into that station using the remote channel buttons, then for each channel press record button to start recording it and proceed all the way through the record options until the recording starts [wait for the red light on the front to come on], wait a few seconds, then press record button again and select " stop recording" to cancel the recording.
Repeat this for all FTA channels you have/can get.
This will auto-create stations on your Tivo, it won't give them the right number (for now) but it will at least give you some channels you can record.
Then you can use the dbset (or dbsetx) to "fix up" the channel Ids and Channel ids and names later on.

Having created the stations like this you now do manual recordings from them and once you have fudged the statiod Id to match the ones in the guide data you'll get program listings as well.

Otherwise, yes do a re-image and start again cleanly.
Unless you're happy with mucking around inside the MFS then this option is the easiest, except you lose existing recordings and any work you've done to date.
From what you're saying thats not much...