Diary of a newbie (last two weeks of 2008)

[ykmike]

I set my budget at £350 based on the idea that a single years subscription to Virgin or Sky would be in the area of £30 a month.

So the first plan was:
A moderate 80 or 85 cm dish, A reasonable motor, a reasonable/well supported SD receiver (not Linux I felt I would have enough on setting everything else up). And if all that went well in a year’s time invest in a HD receiver and perhaps a Diablo or similar.

I posted my shopping list onto Techwatch and had a couple of replies! The advice was go for a bigger (100cm) dish and a HD receiver. So with my new list and bigger budget! I started trawling the suppliers looking for specific kit, and then telephoned / mailed suppliers with queries.

SouthernSatellite came up trumps Ian had the dish I wanted and was expecting the tm motor that week, he threw a complete curved ball by suggesting a Clarketech in place of the Technomate. Ordering the week before Christmas was a risk but Ian came up with the goods literally.

Setting the dish was very tricky on my own, I only managed a signal after buying a satellite finder from Screwfix (not much choice on Xmas eve), after tweaking the dish I feel that am getting there (30 E – 30 W & increasing each day)

Lots of free channels and HD! OMG HD is superb just getting HD makes it worth while,

Plan – Yet more dish tweaks.


Advice from a newbie? Read the forums. If you cannot see the screen from the dish, buy a meter the patience of SWMBO is very limited with these things.

[bigtee]

[milli260876]

Hiya Mate i'm new to this caper too, tip for ya if you have line of site scan 42e. It showed no signal on my tm3100 when i scanned it however found allsorts... just wish i could hack it all!!!

[ykmike]

milli260876 - Thanks I moved round to 42 enticed by the Discovery Hd. Found TURKSAT but the scan showed nothing despile lots of transponders. I turned USALS off and steered using 1.2 (minor improvement in signal) rescanned and got quite a few channels, nothing I can comprehend yet.

I am still disappointed at the scrambling on 9E last night.