At a scrapyard I collected a dozen of Topfield DVB PVRs for 2€ apiece. Hard disks were already gone but plenty of interesting parts were waiting for salvation.
Today I am looking inside of the tuner, or more specifically, into the shielded tuner boxes soldered onto the PCB – the little boxes you connect the signal to. The idea was to determine the chips used (with a back thought USB SDR has taken over and analogue tuners have become rarity). A very short summary is: yes, the chips used within the tuners, mostly are well documented. The datasheets are available and, within the Linux RDS code, there are hints helping to deal with the chips.
Here is the pinout (which actually is identical for both of tuners) …
and which seems to be valid for even more tuners (like DNOS886ZV302A(T) ).
TDTC9251DV01C(T)
Seems like this tuner is for DVB-T.
Datasheet for demodulator chip MT352 is available(see also notes from the Linux world and the src code):
IF stage has been built on SL2009 (a dual stage IF amplifier):
Beneath the PCB we can find yet another chip: Taifun TUA 6034T which actually is a three band tuner chip working up to ~900MHz:
TCMU30311PJT
It is a very similar tuner, however intended for DVB-C.
The chip controlling the input is Taifun TUA 6034 once again (with ~900MHz limit):
The QAM demodulator chip is STV0297D and some data is available on it:
Last but not least, the IF stage is built using an analogue a chip marked as 3218, using EPCOS and SAW filters:
The verdict: so far nothing seen that stops the analogue use. For digital use, one has to solve the transport of the 8-bit output stream that RDS normally sends over USB. It also seems MT352 is a crucial chip needing firmware.
karu sisemus 