British TV in Gite?

[Eslier]

quote:

"Hadn't realised that you could get LNBs with multiple outputs. Anyone any thoughts as to whether this would give me more signal strength than our current single output LNB with a splitter?"

Yes you almost certainly would be better off. I assume that you are using french boxes to receive freeview channels only, as a sky box won't (or at least shouldn't) work properly if more than one is connected to the same lnb (all to do with the volts being output by the digibox to switch between high and low band channels). You might just be able to get away with putting in an amplifier.

Take a look at:

http://www.satcure.co.uk/accs/index.html

All the bits you might need can be purchased from there and they will post most items to France (but not didiboxes).

There's also a lot of information available on this site.

[mascamps.com]

We currently run with one Sky box and another French box. It works fine if we have one or the other connected but we lose channels if we connect both, similar to the way we lose channels if there's a storm etc. (we're right at the limit of being able to use an 80cm dish, hence 95cm dish currently sitting in the attic).

Hadn't thought about the voltages being different and that being the case it does sound like a multi-output LNB is the way to go. To save a bit of recabling, presumably I could use one output into the splitter and off to French boxes?

Next question: is there another way of putting the free channels (or indeed Sky) into multiple rooms (each with their own channel selection) without buying one digibox per room? I'm thinking that the likes of the Hilton can't possibly be buying several hundred digiboxes per hotel but perhaps they do?

 

Arnold

 

[Liz]

[quote]Hello to you all, From all of your experiences do people (clients) now expect to have a TV receiving British programmes in a gite?? Despite my youth I think that a holiday in rural France means getti...[/quote]

We must get old fashioned visitors!  A number of people have said they do not turn on the TV (Free to Air UK satellite + French)  and the current ones, here for 3 weeks, have told their young son it is broken.

Liz (29)

[mascamps.com]

That's the same for us. The snag is that most people pick places based on 1) location 2) nice looking place 3) price and 4) facilities. Going by the photos I've seen of places listing on ourinns & ourgites, everywhere is nice so you're really down to price and facilities to differentiate you from your competitors in your local area. So, if your price is similar (and most seem to be from what I've seen) you're down to facilities to distinguish you from your competitors.

As I say, even if people don't think that they'll want to watch neighbours or whatever when they're here, all else being equal they will probably choose a place that has UK TV over one that doesn't.

In practical terms, there have only been three people (out of several hundred) who have used the DVD players that we installed earlier in the year. Harder to say re the satellite TV but it wasn't working for a few weeks and only one person asked about it so it doesn't get a lot of use either.

So it's not so much that people will use the facilities, it's that they think that they might. There are some people who choose places because they don't have TV etc. but it seems to me that that's a limited market.

 

Arnold