free to air dishes

[benson]

We bought a free to air (numerique) sat system last year.  We set up the dish connected the box and spent about 6 hours adjusting the dish till we recieved a good signal (we cpuld choose between Astra, Hotbird and several others.)  Hurray about 600 channels down side only 1 in English and only Arte in French the rest were Arab or Italian and lots of Porn (not suitable for the Kids!!) Up side children learnt some Italian!! We managed to find a channel that showed 1 film a night in English at 9pm but a few months later the time slot changed to 1 am.  We gave up and got SKY.   Is there anything I can do to the original system to obtain English and or French channels or should it go in the bin??

[Anton Redman]

Two ideas :

Check the receiver works with the co ax cable from the dish you have aimed at SKY. This should give you BBC1 to 4, CBBC Sky News and loads of UK music but not ITV. If it does you can set the other dish up it up so part of the family can watch TV while you have Radio 4 or what ever.

Try realigning the dish to the notional position 5 degrees west, whoich is the position of the French Analague service BUT at present is also being used to transmit the French FTA channels in clear. Ther is no gurantee how long this will continue.

[Richardbk]

[quote]We bought a free to air (numerique) sat system last year. We set up the dish connected the box and spent about 6 hours adjusting the dish till we recieved a good signal (we cpuld choose between Astra...[/quote]

Seems to me that you are pointing at the wrong satellite, either at 13deg east or the old SKY satellites at 19.2deg east. for SKY/BBC you need 28.2 deg east (of south). The old astra satellites at 19.2deg east are used for Canal +, amongst other things. For about 20euros you can buy a cheap dish alignment device that goes inline in the cable with an earpiece to help you align the dish. In the north east quarter of france a small SKY mini dish will work fine, but for most other areas a 80cm dish is needed. Here in the south west even with a 80cm dish I notice that the dish needs to be very acurately aligned to be able to get the BBC during poor weather conditions.

It is likely that your new box is not pretuned to the FTA channels on 28.2E (BBC etc) so you will have to tune manually. check out http://www.lyngsat.com/astra2d.html for the tunning parameters and also check the astra 2a and 2b fequencies for anything else in the clear (marked as 'F'. There is a frequency(e.g 10773 or 10.733),  polarisation(Horizontal or Vertical H/V) a symbol rate (e.g 22.0 or 22000) and an FEC error correction (e.g 5/6) parameter that need to be manually entered for each channel.

BTW you could use the other pages of the above web site to compare channels and work out which satellite you are actually pointing at. From your descriptions it would seem that you are currently pointing to either astra at 19.2degE or the hotbird satellites at 13deg east http://www.lyngsat.com/hotbird.html- if so shift the dish anti clockwise by the required amount and adjust downwards slightly.

There may also be a problem in that the receiver may not have a signal strength meter, or if it is it is set to a channel not on 28.2E (or perhaps there is no tuning meter at all)- in this case your'll have to set up the dish and then play around with the manual tuning - for this you will definetely need some form of dish alignment gadget to fist get the dish properly aligned.

regs

Richard