Does it work after setting "tv norm" to "secam" in xawtv?
My xawtvrc reads thus: [global] freqtab = france [defaults] input = Television norm = SECAMI don't know if this is what you meant... I've played around with quite a lot of the options (auto scanning, manual tuning, PAL*, SECAM) and that is in fact how i managed to ascertain that the PAL channels worked ok!
Cheers, Philip Dodd