It never rains but it pours. Having started watching TV again, the remote for the STB has died. The light on the remote shines when a button is pressed, but nothing happens. Cleaned card, rebooted box but not change. STB itself is working OK, but not receiving signal from remote. Pressing buttons on STB is tedious.
We bought the Sky Freesat service in August 2005. STB, card, dish and installation for £150, with countless free channels and nothing more to pay, so after ten years, probably shouldn't complain. My understanding is that if we buy a new STB, we just need to connect two cables (to dish and TV), use the existing Sky card and it will work.
But, which STB? Too much choice! One I saw has a wi-fi dongle to connect to home network, which I think makes it work like Google's Chromecast? That would be useful, as we were thinking of buying a TV Chromecast anyway, having had success with the audio version.
Is it possible to use a dish/STB to view Freeview as well as Sky channels? Reason for question is the Watch channel seems to be available via Freeview, but only as part of a Sky subscription, which we don't want.
To be honest, most of our viewing will be the basic four channels, and I don't imagine recording will be a high priority.