Cost of installing Sky / Satellite

[Fiona]

Hi there,  we already subscribe to Sky in the UK and plan to continue with our subscription when we move next month.  We plan to take our box and card with us (and possibly our dish?). Sorry, I don't care - I am really looking forward to moving but I like Coronation Street etc etc and I am not ashamed to admit it [;-)]   However, initially we are renting a furnished gite which has a telly but it is not plugged into an ariel.  Question is - will it be very expensive to get kitted out to have Sky there?  If so I don't think my partner will be too impressed, seeing as we will be moving out of there after 6-8 months.  We do have a little portable satellite which we bought for the camper van, and to be honest have never used in our van as we do actually manage to get by with the telly when we travel in it.  It's one of these that folds away in a case and you point it in the right way to pick up the signal - it is supposed to work all the way down into Spain but we have never used it.  Would this work on the tv in the place we are renting?

many thanks

Fi

[Théière]

No need to appologise, let them who is without sin cast the first............

It should work ok. The portable kits usually have a compass and sat finder so should be plain sailing.

Providing the tv has a scart socket

[cooperlola]

The portable dishes are being discusssed here: http://www.completefrance.com/cs/forums/1578443/ShowPost.aspx

The consensus is with Teapot.[:)]

[cooperlola]

Duplicate deleted.

[ViVienne]

we just bought a dish and all the fittings from ebay, we managed to find the position of the satellite on the internet and used a compass (and cheated a bit by pointing it in the same direction as British neighbours!!) it was really easy and I'm thinking if we can do it anybody can as we are not exactly the most technically minded of people. We bought a bigger dish and find the picture doesn't break up quite so much in bad weather as our friends who have the smaller one.

[Fiona]

thanks folks, and thanks for the link to the other thread - really sorry, I hadn't seen it!  Sounds like the portable dish should be just the ticket - it looks like the one that Ernie posted a link to on Amazon - so hopefully I needn't miss one minute of the X Factor when it comes back (I know, how sad am I [:D])

thanks again

[AnOther]

Whilst the 35cm kit I linked to will probably work reasonably well it is definitely minimalist and could suffer loss of signal in rain so unless size is a crucial factor then personally I would go for something a tad bigger such as a 45 or 60cm unit.

Good luck with the move.

 

[Pierre ZFP]

I checked and mine is a 45 cm dish and it all comes packed up in a large briefcase sized carrier like the one in ErnieY's link. The complete kit cost (from memory) around 50 euros in one of the Brico sheds.

The picture will break up in heavy rain or snow but it has to be really heavy so 99% of the time it's perfectly OK.

I will say that it benifits from a stable base to fix it on.  The supplied 'sucker' is marginal at best and since small ( 0.5 degree) movements will break up your reception, sticking it to say the roof of your car isn't so good (let alone what it might do to the paintwork !)

I would suggest fixing it to a post or whacking a temporary post in the ground is the way to go