French free and UK FreeSat/FTA advice needed.

[lelandv]

Hi,

We are shortly moving house and currently have CanalSat on Astra with direct subscription with CanalSat, as well as terrestrial digital off the Sandy Heath transmitter in Beds/Cambs.

The area we are moving to is not very well served with terrestrial digital, and we are cancelling our direct CanalSat subscription as we will be closing our french bank accounts... besides we have the 'Passion' package at the moment and rarely view much of anything other than the classic french channels anyway (TF1, F2, F3, F4, TV5, M6).

I am looking for suggestions to continue to receive the full range of free-to-air English channels (using FreeSat or something similar in the absence of adequate freeview reception) and the standard 'free' French channels without ongoing subscription charges and preferably without too much outlay for hardware. Ideally, a solution for a standard decoder box capable of receiving both/any services and either a dual-head/multi-head or motorised dish would have been my first thought, but not sure of the best solution given the myriad of receivers and different satellite constellations.

Could you advise the easiest and lowest-cost solution to achieve this?

Many thanks,

Leland

[Analoguesat]

Dish pointing at 5W and an old analogue receiver is the cheapest way, BUT the analogue channels will be ceasing in 2-3 years time, and they are transmitted in SECAM, so you need your tv or receiver to be SECAM compatible.

[nanochickin]

You can get ARTE Français, France 3 Corse Via Stella, France 3 Rhône-Alpes Auvergne, LCP plus all the other France.TV channels on 5w in digital FTA.

Unfortunately you will lose TF1 and M6 as they are not FTA in Digital.

There is also french FTA content on 13e and 19e with the likes of TV5 Monde and others which don't come to mind at the moment

The other alternative is to have a look at the Technomate 1000 range of receivers. If you patch the receiver you can currently open up TPS France at the moment on 13e although you do have to update a file on the receiver everyday by connecting it to your computer with a 9 pin null modem cable. :?

Hope this helps



Nano

[BGonaSTICK]

As far as the English stuff goes, loss of Freeview shouldn't really be a concern for most people these days, with an equivalent package available on satellite.

There are one of two differences in the channel line-up, but there are actually many more channels available from satellite when compared to terrestrial.

Most of the extras are rubbishy shopping/gaming/dating type channels, but there is a large handful of goodies buried in amongst there too, along with more great digital radio than you can shake a stick at.

Cheap and easy to do. Either shell out £150 (one-off payment, no subscription) to Sky to just have everything installed, or find/reuse an existing sky minidish and add a second-hand digibox from eBay for £35 or so.

If you go the latter route, you will also need to buy a £20 FTV (one-off payment, no subscription) card from Sky to enable Channel 4, FIVE, Sky Three, 5US and 5Life.

For the Sky stuff go here: www.freesatfromsky.com

I'd keep the Sky dish for the free English stuff whatever else you do, and then add another dish for 5W or maybe a little motorised setup instead. The latter is pretty cheap at maybe £100 for all the external bits, and a heap of fun.

If you go the motorised route, then it'll be far easier to get the digital version of the second receiver.

Let us know which way you're leaning, and we can give you some more advice.

[lelandv]

Thanks for the replies/info everyone. It looks like we're going to end up going for an 80cm dish pointing at Hotbird but with an offset to pick up Astra as well, and a digital receiver. TF1 and M6 are lower priority anyway

For the terrestrial stuff, it turns out that the freeview database is about 4 years out of date and the Sandy Heath transmitter is sending out at much higher power than it used to. As a result, I've been assured that at the new house location we will definitely be able to pickup digital from Sandy Heath if we use an 80elem external aerial and perhaps a preamp to help on those "rainy days".

Cheers all!

Leland

[BGonaSTICK]

Hotbird and Astra 1 (19.2E), or Hotbird and Astra 2 (28.2E)?

If the former, you could just get a monoblock LNB - effectively a pair of LNBs already setup (angle-wise) to receive Hotbird and Astra 1, and a switch to automatically flick between the two built-in.

The Phoenix Apollo is a very good FTA receiver, as is the Technomate TM-1000D.

[Analoguesat]

Thats 9 degrees of seperation Stick, not 6.

[BGonaSTICK]

Have you got your former and latter mixed up?

[lelandv]

Thanks again all.

Had a dual LNB fixed dish installed for Hotbird and Astra 1.. worked a treat. Wanted to get more satellites though without cluttering the wall with dishes, so today I ripped out one of the LNBs and installed a Diseqc motor so now have full view of everything from 40W to 45E. Happy camper, and the actual installation and alignment was much easier than I expected it to be (especially since I don't have any of the standard alignment instruments -- sat finder/meter, inclinometer, etc.)

Installation was still very straightforward since the instructions both with the rotor and in BGonaSTICK's tutorial are pretty comprehensive. Align the rotor on the latitude, declination of the dish according to the table based on lattitude and mount the thing. Centre it due south then drive it 1 degree to the west to fine-align on THORN 2/3. Check against Hispasat to the west and Intelsat-12 and pan across all in between to make sure it tracks through the rest of them to confirm the arc alignment and all worked...
(small issue with USALS, but found a work-around -- see other post in general help forum)



Leland

[BGonaSTICK]

Congrats. It's a good feeling when you get it all working, and no mean feat to get such a good range