You can directly see Silabs' full potential as a tuner in pc cards like TBS5522x.
Silabs is exceptional with very low SR, but not as stable with several weird modulations, especially VCM/ACM, and not able to lock GS.
Plus the strange issue it has with the Asturias MIS package on Hispasat, which is not stable although nothing seems weird with its modulation.
On Enigma2 though things are worse. The only tuner revision that works well is the one on HiSilicon receivers (SF8008) compared to the absolutely tragic performance on Gfutures receivers (HD51, Zgemma H7 etc).
Just try a blindscan and see the results.
Gfutures provides no binary but pure hardware blindscan. This could work decently, but for a nonsensical reason the latest driver maps all modulations to QPSK and FECs to Auto. 32APSK is not found anymore (although fully supported by the hardware), and 16PSK is found but is not functional since its impossible to scan (when selected there is no signal). Of course both of them can be locked but only if you set the tuner to select QPSK (or 8PSK which is also mapped to QPSK, but gets locked and detected during a blindscan). No correct FEC will be found, only Auto is returned.
The tuner driver also does not allow real time depiction or auto recognition of the tuned parameters when these change or are slightly wrong. If for instance the tuned frequency is 11720 28000 8PSK 2/3, and you tune to 11715 27990 QPSK 9/10, then only the latter is registered and shown in tuner status and infobars without being automatically corrected.
At the same time Availink tuners will continuously tune to the correct values.
Finally Gfutures made very low SR completely non fuctional. Last revision at least could lock SR 185 on Hispasat, now it's impossible.
On the flipside things are far better on SF8008 with their driver. Blindscan works better finding the correct modcodes and most FECs. This allows 16APSK and 32APSK to be shown. However the auto correction is not working here either. Very low SR continues to remain fully functional.
Not to mention that with the vast majority of tuners, it does not support Auto PLS discovery, but this is still rare and limited to only the new Availink and some Montage tuners.
Overall as a tuner it's decent, but needs more support to fully unlock its potential.
Compared to Availink (Edision OS mio etc) which is exceptional with strange modcodes, but completely inoperable in very low SR (it takes more than 5 minutes to lock SR 667 on 5W, which of course is non functional in real time, but it's the lowest it can somehow cope with) and noticeably slower in locking frequencies, Silabs with good support is fast and stable with what it can support.
Overall you can't have everything. I hope the new Montage M88RS6060 which seems to support anything from very low SR to Auto PLS discovery and very fast tuning will be used in future Enigma2 receivers, making them real powerhouses in the hands of the enthusiasts.
