I have been offered sky dish and digibox by friend leaving the country. I have heard that you can get free installation of all of this, if you take on a subscription.
My thoughts were to use my friend's gear to avoid the hassle and costs of dealing with sky. I only want to pick up the free to air stuff.
My question is:
Will the digibox (or card thingy) expire? and will I end up having to deal with sky anyway to re-enable this? If I use his gear, can I get channels via another route/card supplier?
In message , TheScullster managed to combine nouns and verbs in a pleasing form to communicate the following;
Only the BBC (and perhaps some of the many millions of home shopping channels) broadcast un-encrypted so you will miss out on ITV, C4 and C5 so you will need a card of some sort in the digibox and the card your friend has will expire when he stops handing over money to Murdoch. Getting the kit installed by Sky for free will require you signing up for a minimum of 12 months on one of their channel packages and that will cost you over £200!
All is not lost however as Sky, spooked by the success of Freeview have launched a similar service based on their satellite platform, read all about it here.
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will need to buy a card for £20 (the bit about buying a card only is well hidden on the site) and pay someone to install the dish (I've never done DIY on a dish install but I understand that you can't just wave the dish around until you pick up a signal - you need some installation gear).
That said, for £150 you will get a new digibox installed rather than your friends old kit so really the deciding factor is how much you will be charged to have your friendly local installer install and align your dish.
Fitting & aligning a dish isn't difficult. There are calculations to work out which angles of tilt and azimuth (try Google) to pick up Astra. Once you are pointing in more or less the right direction, you CAN use internal metering (depending on receiver model) or buy a cheap "strength meter". Try Maplins, about £10 ISTR.
You do need a clear line-of-site to the satellite's position in the sky. If you can't see it, you won't get a picture!
I got one of these from maplins a few years ago, came with a compass too I think :o)
True, but dont the dishes have an offset focus or something so the dish isnt pointing directly at the satellite (I have seen some installations where you would think the signal is blocked by a wall but the angle isnt quite what you would expect and it works fine)
And it's about another 3 months before the sun is more or less in the same place in the sky as the satellite constellation . I took the October opportunity to confirm that where I could neatly and unobtrusively fit a dish would actually be able to see the birds.
But if you have a small telescope and look at the right time you can see them.
But should still function as a FTV card (for ITV1 Ch4 and five), though I'm not sure how Sky will react to the change of "ownership" of a) the kit b) the card.
You need to get the initial point direction reasonably close, but after that a cheap meter will do or the stuff built into the Rx how ever seeing that on the TV screen whilst up a ladder brings another set of problems. There is plenty of stuff on the web on How To...
At a tangent, do Sky boxes (I deal with 'normal' satellite as a day job) receive non-Sky channels? If it will handle it, a dual LNB would allow reception of Hotbird and a huge choice on non-encrypted European TV. Why you might want to watch it though....
Aha, I never knew there was a signal meter built into my digibox (a happy half hour spent Googling and playing with the thing has taught me loads this afternoon - Dad! Can we have Fox Kids on now...)
Dunno, but the instruction manual / Set up menu does have 'extra channels' wherein one inputs frequncy, polarisation, language and lots of other info ... I dimly remeber thinking;- "Must try that out" ... but, never got round to it.
Seems likely, provided they're within the boresight of the dish,
Perhaps you are like me, married to someone who comes from the other side of the channel, may be learning a language, may just be interested 'cos their there;) or you might like some of the excellent radio services like Swiss or Berlin or Paris Jazz, and around 4 other 5 classic music stations that haven't forgotten what sound quality is about:)
"Dave Liquorice" wrote | > If you can't see it, you won't get a picture! | And it's about another 3 months before the sun is more or | less in the same place in the sky as the satellite constellation . | I took the October opportunity ...
If you are of an astronomical persuasion a reminder closer to the time when this next happens might be of interest here and in ukdtv
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