Terrestrial French TV on the south coast

[Ptostevin]

Hi - a friend gave us an old analogue satellite set up this week so my son can watch the Tour de France on Eurosport in July - it just happened that to make it easier to get the dish pointing in the right direction I got out a french (pal/secam) portable TV that we had in the garage and we setup the dish in the garden with the portable next to it. Powered on the tv and found that on its small dipole aerial we were picking up French TV, admittedly quite poor quality. We are right on the south coast in Sussex and I was wondering if using a good aerial pointing to France we could get a good enough signal to watch French TV. Has any one tried it? If not I'll have a further play with the satellite dish and try and point it at a satellite that has French channels.

Paul

[Martin963]

It may be worth trying a better aerial, however it may have been that the settled anticyclonic weather this week gave you a "duct" from a French TV Tx that would not normally exist. Suggest that you try the same experiment several more times before investing too much.

Certainly some people are able to enjoy fairly stable reception of French TV on the south coast, but UHF signals are normally confined to 40 miles for reliable reception, and the satellite route is probably going to be as cheap and far more reliable than UHF reception.

If you have any idea what channel numbers you were receiving the signals on I can try and identify which station it was. The relevant range is 21 - 68.

[Miki]

LAST EDITED ON 28-May-04 AT 08:53 PM (BST)

With an analogue set up, you can pick up the Telecom 2B satellite and receive all 5 standard French stations.

Look through the archives, I think it's there somewhere or just ask your local satellite man where to point the dish for Telecom 2B.

Miki