Quote:
Originally Posted by RichardDavis
Hi everyone, Im new here. I was given a huge flat screen TV and a Sky Box HD by a friend who went back to USA. The TV worls great on my standard TV areial and has Freeview built in.
I don't have satelite dish but I'd like to receive Freesat for the extra channels it has. I don't want a subscription to anything, just whatever services are free.
I'm not clear on couple of things that you experts might be able to help with.
1) I can walk onto our roof and fix the dish myself easily, but will any dish work with a sky box?
2) The sky box has two inputs for TV ariel cable, but do I need to run two cables down the side of the house for the sky box?
3) If I align the dish to Astra (145.6deg magnetic - I checked already) how do I know I'm not picking up Astra and not another satelite?
4) I would also like to receive TV from Brazil, but that's not on Freesat. Should I buy a motorised dish to tune to another satelite? If so what dish should I buy for that?
Thanks, Richard, North London, UK
|
1. You can install your own dish. Any dish sold for use in the UK will do. But aligning it is not nearly as simple as aligning a terrestrial aerial. Consider purchasing an electronic satellite finder to assist you.
2. Yes. There are two inputs because the Sky+HD box has a hard-drive-based video recorder inside it (a PVR, Personal Video Recorder) and can record one channel while you watch another. To do this it has two tuners built in. You can't split the cable from a dish the way you can from a terrestrial aerial. Every satellite tuner in your house needs a cable all the way back to the dish and the LNB (the box that sits on the end of the dish arm) needs enough terminals for all the cables. You will need a dual-LNB for your box. Or, to allow for future expansion, a quad-LNB would give you four terminals for up to four tuners. Having said all that, the PVR functions of a Sky box will not work unless you pay a monthly subscription to Sky.
3. You point your dish at 28.2 degrees east for Astra and Eurobird satellites broadcasting free-to-air channels to the UK. You will know if you got it wrong because the box will fail to find any of the channels you want.
4. What kind of rig you need if you want to also receive Brazilian TV would depend on exactly where those satellites are located. It may be possible to mount a second LNB on the dish for the Brazilian stuff and still have a static dish, but my suspicion is that the relevant satellite may be too far removed from 28.2E and may require a far larger dish than one designed for UK channels. In that case you're looking for a large motorised dish that will be controlled by a Diseqc-compliant satellite box. Sky boxes are not Diseqc-compliant.