Sat TV in France - my experience

[Ac50]

UK Digital TV in France

Herewith something of a story and a request.
First the request:
Does anyone in France have a second hand, off-contract sky digibox, with the newly activated free2view card they would like to sell? If so please send me a note.

The story it is true: if you want UK TV and radio you should get a digibox right from the beginning - I did not!
I live in Normandy , just a little too far to pick up UK TV from the Channel Islands, but in summer, on clear nights, we get brilliantly clear transmissions from Southampton (Meridian?) -- all of the UK channels - (we have a PAL TV - the outside aerial is set up for French TV!). But still, when available, the channels fade in and out.
We would like an little extra UK-based TV, but do not want a sky subscription. I have neither a UK address nor bank account and I did not want to get involved with making phone calls and or asking/hassling friends.

Step 1: we purchased an (expensive) high gain , whopper of a TV aerial and signal amplifierit did not work!
(still sits in my roof!).

Step 2: we bought a relatively cheap analogue dish and tuner.. First I had to find out what 19.2E means , this involved looking on the internet (i.e. a bit left of south) . Out came the old cubs compass but ended up pointing the dish up a bit and facing south (where the sun is at midday ) and then knocked the arm a little bit to the left. The other secret here was that the dish was low on the wall and so no ladders involved and the dish was linked via short cable to tuner and TV. (I agree this must not be done on a wet day!!). It took about 2 hrs of fiddlingbut we got Astra analogue loads of channels, most in German. But importantly, for Mom and Dad there were a couple of English news channels and for the teenagers there was Europe MTV. All went well for quite some time. However we were always competing against MTV ..and at the time Ozzie was doin me head in . And this was not the reason we wanted the TV rather be without it!

We had always said wed live here 2 years without British TV so the kids can pick up the language.. blow me down , almost 2 years to the day, the BBC went free to air on Astra 28 digital!!!(I learned this though the Living France site - many thanks). We just happened to go to the brico and there was a digital box on special. With hindsight I wish I had paid the 200Fr or so more (yes, I still think in Francs!) for the version with 2 LNBs --- however, I was not absolutely sure it was even going to work and the digital version being around 700Fr was not cheap..still if only it gave me access to Radio 2, I thought it would be worth it.

So we got home and duly fitted up the 80cm dish, this time we bolted that one to a post on the ground (up along the side of the house I think theres nothing worse than a satellite dish stuck on an old French farmhouse!) OK, we found south, tilted the dish a bit back from vertical , (a tad more than for the Astra 19 analogue) .. mind you, its all relative -- since the support pole itself was not dead vertical! So fiddling on the ground makes it easier.within 3 hrs we had a good picture and could get all BBC channels, ITV news radio ..(using the in built signal strength/quality bars). I now realise from some of the forum threads that we have been lucky to lock on relatively easily (it also useful to have a highly motivated teenager who will give a lot of help if they think theres extra TV as a reward )..

I can really recommend Euronews and you can select to listen in English or several other European languages using the remote control. (Woe of woes MTV was no longer available on the digital site! but there were a couple of stations called POP and originally Chart Show, but strangely sometimes they are there and sometimes they are not it only happens with the music channels). I have only had a couple of occasions in really horrible weather where we could not get the BBC picture and often if the picture on one station had gone there was something available on another. So we must have been lucky and found that needle in the haystack point.

Always one to fiddle one day, I connected the digital box to the old, redundant analogue LNB and knocked the arm a bit to the left and up ( from 19.2 to 28E), low and behold , this analogue universal LNB worked to pick up the BBCso now I have two dishes set up and pointing at the right satellite.

Christmas was a pleasure and we managed to watch Morecambe and Wise and the John Wayne movies, just like the old days, in fact the only good things on TV were programmes from the old days maybe we should just have bought some old tapes! .. but I digress. We managed to get a copy of the radio Times for Christmas and there we could see all of these other channels available.

I have followed some of the satellite threads on Living France on and off

[Mazan]

>This morning I was told, by
>one of the local satellite
>receiver sellers (who kindly phoned
>me back after I sent
>an email), that this
>card system had stopped at
>the end of Dec 2003?

FTV card replacement and new card issue is extended to the end of Jan 2004, at least. The cards of course will work for several years after that time. They are guaranteed to work for two years.


>However, I also understand the sky
>digibox is a good way
>of finding out whats onthrough
>the programme guide

It is indeed.


>So as I said, it would
>have been easier to go
>straight to the sky digibox
>in the first place

Yes. For UK channels you just can't beat a Sky digibox.


> If
>anyone can answer if the
>cards are still valid

All series 2 cards should continue to decode the FTV channels until the next card change. This would normally be many years away. The first issue of cards lasted 5 years.