Canalsat France on Astra 1L

[Chancer]

My girlfriend (who is French) has recently moved into her house and I want to improve her TV reception for Christmas but I dont want to scale the roof for fear of becoming another Rod Hull!

There is an antenna which is giving a weak signal and also a parabole, she had bought and tried an anologue Sat receiver but got no picture, I have one also and know they show nothing unless correctly aligned to the relevant satellite.

Having looked from the road at the dish I see that it is aligned with all the neighbouring ones and also has a significant skew on the LNB which made me think that it was receiving a digital signal.

I roughly checked the compass bearing and I believe it to be pointing at Astra 1L, I have done some checking and found that this is used for Canalsat.

Editted it looks to be pointing about 20 degrees west of south which would be more like Telecom 2B, all of the others in the street seem to be pointing this way.

What are my options?

I assume that to access the Canalsat bouquet I will have to buy or rent a decoder and she would have to pay an abonnement which doesnt seem to be such a nice a Xmas present from me!

I have a French digital FTA receiver (minus remote control lost by tenant) which I could use but dont know what, if any French speaking channels are available on that transmitter.

What are most French households with paraboles pointing at that satellite receiving and by what equipment?

Altenatively, and I realise that this may involve me getting on the roof, what is the best satellite to aim at to recieve the most French FTA channels on a recepteur numerique?

Thank you in advance.

[Martin963]

Well there are a lot of alternatives but here goes.

If your dish is pointing at ex Telecom 2B (now called Atlantic Bird 3) you can use your existing decodeur numerique to get France 2/3/Arte/Parliament/5.

11591 MHz,  V pol,  22000 kbps,  FEC = 2/3

That should get you through Christmas!    Although if you are minus the remote you may have a job getting the box to tune those parameters in.

If you stay on that satellite you can get a BIS subscription from Absat for €4.99 per month which includes all the terrestrial digital channels and a couple of premium channels.   Picture quality is reported as pretty dire.

If you bought an analogue receiver and used that on AB3 you'd get TF1 as well as France Televisions but in SECAM colour which may not suit a UK TV set.    This will only last until 2010 when analogue is switched off.

If you moved round to AStra 1 at 19 deg E you could get a few French channels free to air but the majority are encrypted.    A TNT par satellite box is available now at the grandes surfaces for €129 (one off) which will buy you a card & box and get you the 18 TNT channels from Astra 1.

I think the BIS package is duplicated on Hotbird (where TPS is at the moment but not for much longer) but there's no point in going there if you're already on AB3.

Obviously you can take out a Canalsat sub on Astra 1 but to be honest it's a bit pointless unless you're into films/sports or specialist programmes.

[Chancer]

Thank you very much Martin.

The Tv is no problem as it is her French one.

For the TNT par satellite option what satellite will it need to be aligned with?

Tomorrow I hope to do more checking without getting up on the roof, the problem I have is with the kit I have available to check the signal strength.

The analogue receiver shows nothing which indicates to me that it is either misaligned, a cable disconnected or LNB failed

I would like to use my digital one to check the strength and quality but have no remote control to drive it with (it was previously loaded with astra 1 channels)

I have a sat meter which has a seperate battery pack to power the LNB but have only ever used it as a comparator, I dont know if I could use it to verify signal strength only better/worse when aligning the dish, but dont want to get on roof!

Could I use my ohmeter to check for continuity? What resistance should I expect from a connected LNB?

Do you have any suggestions?

[Martin963]

TNT par satellite (via Canalsat at €129) is Astra 1 19 deg east,

If your analogue box has the basic six analogue channels memorised and shows nothing then it does sound as though something isn't right in the dish installation.

Unless the signal meter is fairly sophisticated it will only give -as you say - comparitive indications. 

I'll put my meter across a spare LNB and tell you in about five minutes!

Laters:  I don't have anything flash but my multimeter shows open circuit across an LNB.   I imagine that changes when you actually send the required 13 or 18V DC.    Not sure you;re going to learn anything from the bottom end of the cable.

Obviously you've got a problem if the dish has blown off alignement,   but it's unlikely that a French occupied house would be on anything other than 5 deg W (AB3, for the analogues)/13 deg E (Hotbird, ex TPS) or 19 deg E (Astra 1, Canalsat and Canal+)

[Martin963]

One other thought.   It's just possible that if your existing dish is on AB3 that it will have a "telecom" LNB on it.    This has a different local oscillator frequency and doesn't require 22 kHz signalling.    A pair of binoculars MIGHT let you read on the label  "LO = xx"

If you think it is I'll calculate the new settings to put into your analogue sat receiver;   it won't work with your digital one as the IF's will be out of band.

[Chancer]

Hi Martin

After my stupid accident this year and the subsequent eye operations I virtually need binoculars to read this PC [:D], and I struggle to read labels in the palm of my hand, still it really made me laugh at myself [:D]

I think that I will have to bite the bullet and get up on the roof, I am in fact more worried about damaging the old fragile ardoises than falling off.

The advice re the LNB might well work but the problem I have with my analogue receiever (and I think hers also) is that you only get a display on the TV and hence menu access once it has got a signal and hence something to show on the screen.

I will go and have a play with my one (as long as my dish/lnb is still working) to find the relevant menu, perhaps I can change the setting here and then try it at hers.

[Martin963]

Yep,  I can see the problem with my previous suggestion!

TBH I think in your situation I'd get a dish/LNB and tripod,  and have a play with it on the ground (assuming you have the room).    For the sake of €80  you'd find out much more and stay safe.     I'm not trying to patronise you,   and as I've said before my ten dishes are all at ground level,  the eleventh is on a joist only about 8 ft up.

[Chancer]

Thank you Martin

Not all all patronising and a brilliant idea! It means that I will be able to rule out everything bar the alignment/lnb before getting up on the roof

I might have to set it up facing out of an upstairs bedroom as the street is narrow and all the Amienoise mitoyenne houses are very tall, hence why I am not keen to climb up.

Thank you again[:)]

[Anton Redman]

Having looked from the road at the dish I see that it is aligned with all the neighbouring ones and also has a significant skew on the LNB which made me think that it was receiving a digital sign

As far as I am aware only Sky needs a skew on the LNB.

[Martin963]

Actually Anton raises a point - the original Telecom 1 and 2 birds had a deliberate 22 deg skew from vertical or horizontal,   which was eliminated in the transfer to AB3.    On most installations the signal changed little,   but early sat installations did respect this French anomaly.

In fact all LNB's need a skew apart from for birds due south.   Hispasat needs an anticlockwise small twist,   just as Astra 2 needs a small clockwise one (standing in front of the dish).   For some odd reason astra 2D is optimised with a further small twist on top of the one needed to compensate for the easterly position.

[Anton Redman]

I bought the full kit for French Sat TV including cables from Pro & Cie in Rochechouart to install in a friends house. Ended up getting the odd phone call when he had a problem with Sky instalations for the next couple of years. French instalations are much closer to due South than Sky in most of France.. I am pretty sure their signals are skewed so the LNB should be roughly vertical.

[Martin963]

Yes, the skew only seems to become a problem when you get more than 20 deg away (as measured by orbital position) from due south.    Certainly I can swing a dish round in the UK from 19 deg E to 5 deg W without adjusting the skew.   In fact come to think of it it'll go round to 28 deg E without a problem.  But if you're getting (for whatever reason) a weak signal then it (correct skew) can make the difference between picture and no picture.

[Tim]

Yes, I've noticed that as well, Martin, although some transponders seem to be more sensitive to the skew than others.

Tim

[Chancer]

To bump this back up to the top and hopefully get Martins attention I am posting an update to the as yet unresolved problem.

I connected up my French analogue receiver after deciding that the parabole was facing 5 degrees west and could get channels 5 and 6 only, that is France5/Arte and M6.

Does this indicate an alignment problem or LNB polarisation?

Either way it looks like the ladder will have to be put up!

[Martin963]

Hmmmm....

FR5 and M6 are amongst the lower frequencies for the analogues on AB3,  but France 2 is as well so if it was a question of either a limited bandwidth tuner on the STB or the "wrong" LNB I'd expect you to get M6 and FR 2 but not the rest.   So seems unlikely.

On your display,   does your STB show the true frequency  (ie FR5 on  12606 MHz)  or the IF freq (which would be  1656 MHz for a Telecom LNB and 2006 MHz for a Univeral) or both values?

Whatever it does show,   in an ideal world if you ask it to scan upwards from FR5 it should find all the other channels as they all share the same polarisation and 22 kHz switching.

TBH if you're getting two channels it's unlikely to be an alignement problem 'cos with analogue (as I'm sure you understand) the signal drop off leads to snow and sparklies rather than a "cliff edge" and in my experience you can't align the dish in such a way as to nul out several of the AB3 progs without taking them all out.    The most likely seems to me to be a wrongly set parameter in the STB;  some of these analogue boxes can be devils to set up with awful menus (if you can even call them that!);  I've been defeated by two in my time (both minus their mode d'emplois,  otherwise I'd be ashamed of that tally!!)

I will ponder while anyone else can have a shot!!

[Chancer]

Martin

The manual is at the girlfriends house, I concur with what you say and thought that it might be a retuning job.

I have returned it to its factory settings where I was getting all the 6 channels when I used it at my house but stil only get the 2 mentioned.

The menu is very limited and only appears on the display of the unit, I can change things like LNB frequency, 22khz switching etc, I have played with most options and they either make no difference or I lose the picture.

The next time I am there I will note the factory settinggs for the channels that we do get and the ones we dont in case the manual is out of date but the box was working in my house. She also bought an identical one recently (not knowing that I had one in stock) so I will also compare the manuals.

Looking on the bright side at least I dont have to get up the ladder yet[:)]

The box(es) is/are brico-depot analogue receivers (SX1 perhaps), cant remember the name at the moment but definitely different to the boston digital ones.

Editted

Do the analogue boxes also switch the LNB from horizontal to vertical? If so could that explain the missing channels and the ones received?

[Martin963]

In answer to your last point,  yes,  analogue boxes switch between H & V using the same system of 18 V and 13 V respectively (hope I've got them the right way round).

However,   in this case all the analogues (including TMC) use V pol so if you get one you should get the lot!

More tomorrow,  my jog calls!

[microwave mike]

[quote user="Martinwatkins"]
On your display,   does your STB show the true frequency  (ie FR5 on  12606 MHz)  or the IF freq (which would be  1656 MHz for a Telecom LNB and 2006 MHz for a Univeral) or both values?
 [/quote]

The Telecom LNB has an LO of 11.475 which means the box will display 1131 (12606 - 11475) or thereabouts. Whether or not your LNB is Telecom or Universal, your problem can only be that the missing channels are not tuned in on your receiver. Go to a channel which is working and note down all the parameters from the menu, polarity, audio settings, lnb type, frequency etc. Now go to a spare channel where you get nothing and copy those parameters exactly and you should see that channel in the new position. Now change your frequency (only) up or down and you will eventually find another of the French channels. Store this new channel and then repeat the process. If your LNB is a Universal type, you should find all the analogue channels including TMC. If your LNB is a Telecom type, you will get all except TMC.

 

[Martin963]

Thanks for correcting my Telecom IF figure - where on earth did I get 10.75 GHz from?    Teach ne to conjure stuff out of my brain (what's left of it!)

Apart from that we seem to have been on similar lines

[Chancer]

Thank you again to you both for your advice.

When I tried changing the LNB frequency it was painfully slow, one Hz per second or less unless I enetered the desired frequency using the numeric keypad in which case it was very quick.

I like the idea of  "backing up" the existing data to another channel.

Does anyone know the current correct frequencies for TF1 CH2,3,4 etc which would enable me to check and if necessary input them using the keypad, there is no manual or automatic search function.

This weekend I will make a note of what frequencies and parameters are programmed at the moment.

Its still looking hopefull that I can avoid the ladders and having to transport them there!

 

[microwave mike]

[quote user="J.R."]

 Does anyone know the current correct frequencies for TF1 CH2,3,4 etc which would enable me to check and if necessary input them using the keypad, there is no manual or automatic search function.

[/quote]

TMC = 11.456

M6 = 12.522

France2 = 12.564

Arté/Fr5 = 12.606

TF1 = 12.690

France 3 = 12.732

all channels Vertical polarisation.

 

[Chancer]

Un gros bisous Mike le micronde[:D]

[Chancer]

An update

This weekend I checked the frequencies that were pre-programmed on the box (I had returned it to factory settings) in the manual and on also the receiver display, they were all as you posted.

Any other ideas before I have to get on the roof?

I put my ladders on my property up to do some guttering work and found that I have lost all the confidence that I previously had before losing an eye last year, it comes from being more clumsy and being hyper carefull to compensate, the net result is that I felt really uncomfortable and cannot work with confidence from a ladder.

I dont want her to pay a proffessional only to find that it was something simple, the last tradesman (before I met her) took her for 500 Euros when she snapped her key in the front door lock.

[microwave mike]

[quote user="J.R."]

 This weekend I checked the frequencies that were pre-programmed on the box (I had returned it to factory settings) in the manual and on also the receiver display, they were all as you posted.

 [/quote]

Are you still receiving Arté and M6?

[Martin963]

I've hesitated to add any more because without seeing the set up it's difficult to know what else to suggest.

I think I'd be doing the swap test now,   ie borrow a working analogue STB and put it on your dish,   and take your STB to a known-to-be-working 5 deg W dish and making sure it's set up OK.

It's about the only thing you can do now before getting the ladders out.    If - as Mike says - you are still getting F5 and M6 it does seem more likely to be a set up problem.....