OT: Freesat

rubertoe

What with Xmas up coming and the Freeview + box slowly dieing a death. Its time for an upgrade to the home entertainment system.

What is the crack with Freesat? Can i use an existing satellite and connections or do I need a Freesat specific satellite.

Can anyone recommend me a Freesat + box? and is it worth getting HD?

gtvlusso

rubertoe wrote:

What with Xmas up coming and the Freeview + box slowly dieing a death. Its time for an upgrade to the home entertainment system.

What is the crack with Freesat? Can i use an existing satellite and connections or do I need a Freesat specific satellite.

Can anyone recommend me a Freesat + box? and is it worth getting HD?

Hi, Yes, we have just installed freesat:

I had a sky+ box and dish. We simply bought a Freesat box and plugged it into the Satallit dish LNB cable. The best freesat boxes to buy are made by Humax (as told to me by a satellite installer - he said he gets very few issues with Humax and the interface is really good). Our Humax box has an ethernet connection for BBC Iplayer and ITV player and a movie streaming channel. We have the HD box too, yes, I think it is worth it if you have a 1080p TV.

As long as your sat dish is positioned correctly and the cables are all good - just plug in and play.

As for channels, I don't think there is any more than on Freeview.....

walkingbootweather

We've got 2 Samsung recording Freesat boxes and think they are great.

Got fed up paying an extortionate amount to Sky and have cut the monthly bill for tv, telephone and broadband from about £80 per month to about £20 per month.

Using the existing sky dish etc. was fine although I did change the connector thingy (lnb connector?) so that I could connect an additional receiver.

Picture and sound quality is better than what I was experiencing with my, admittedly rather old, sky box. I even get a few HD channels which are great but you probably need a pretty decent and large tv to notice much difference.

The humax receivers seem to be well regarded, I just bought the Samsung boxes because there was a particularly good deal at the time. They have been fine though.

greg66_tri_v2.0

We have Freesat, really because we had an unused Sky dish on the roof.

Things you need: (a) a dual LNB on the sat dish - this means you need to have two aerial outputs on your dish; (b) two aerial cables running from the dish to your freesat box - one for each freesat tuner in the box (unlike freeview and regular TV, freesat boxes can't identify two signals from a single aerial cable, so without two cables, you'll be watching everything you want to record).

(a) is a pretty simple fix if you need to make it. Check your size and scour ebay. (b) can be a PITA depending on whether you need to run a second cable and your cable run.

Humax definitely gets the nod of the current crop of freesat boxes. If you can find one, the Panasonic DMR-BS750/850/880 is a great piece of kit. Blu ray/DVD/Freesat/Hard disc recorder. The interface is good, if a bot slow.

It's unfortunate that freesat isn't better supported. Sony never got behind it, and Panasonic dropped out a couple of years ago. I'd say the freesat HD picture we get is marginally better than the freeview HD picture we get, and a lot more stable. The only things that seem to upset the freesat picture are snow sitting on the LNB and very, very rainfall in the line of sight between the dish and the satellite.

tgotb

What he said.

More specifically, Freesat uses the same satellite as Sky, so your dish, LNB and cabling will all be fine with no re-alignment. This may not be the case if you've had some other satellite service, but if it was Sky you're fine.

I'm another very happy Humax owner. Someone's put together a firmware hack for my Humax Freesat PVR, which means that if you're a bit geeky you can install a DNLA server on the box and stream anything you've recorded to a PC on your network. Was very useful for watching the TDF upstairs on a laptop while the rest of the family watched normal TV in the living room...

Paul E

I had a Humax one once and it worked fine, nice clear interface, it was the SD not HD one though, lot better than the patchy freeview I could get though

pastryboy

http://www.freesat.co.uk/what-you-get/our-channels

That's more than you get on freeview.

CiB

We've just gone the other way from Freesat to Sky (wish I hadn't bothered). Freesat is fine for casual viewing, all the core channels are there along with a few +1 channels that Freeview doesn't provide. HD is very good on FS; I still haven't seen any HD on Sky that made me think it was better than FS. If your viewing is casual and you don't have a need to watch films & sport FS is a v good option.

A neater option is to buy a TV with FS (and FV if poss) + HD built in. I went for a Panasonic a couple of years ago - it's a much neater solution, having one remote to work all three platforms (two now analogue has gone). Shame that the Sky box re-introduces that problem.

TheStone

What's the freeview box of choice these days?

I like the Humax ones, but my third one is coming to it's end. I find they only last 2-3 years.

tgotb

TheStone wrote:

What's the freeview box of choice these days?

I like the Humax ones, but my third one is coming to it's end. I find they only last 2-3 years.

How's it failing? If it's a hard drive failure (seems most likely) they're very easy to change; I upgraded ours from ~320GB to 1TB several years ago...

TheStone

TGOTB wrote:

TheStone wrote:

What's the freeview box of choice these days?

I like the Humax ones, but my third one is coming to it's end. I find they only last 2-3 years.

How's it failing? If it's a hard drive failure (seems most likely) they're very easy to change; I upgraded ours from ~320GB to 1TB several years ago...

Stutters and reboots quite often. I can live with it, but getting worse. It's the T9300.

tgotb

Not sure, could be the hard disk. If you have a spare, well worth dropping that in and seeing what happens, when it gets to the stage that the problem can be reproduced predictably. Of all the components in a freesat box, the HDD is the only one with moving parts (which makes it much more susceptible to failure).

One other thing to check with electronic devices that seem to be going on the blink is the cooling. Are the vents full of dust? I've resurrected several slow/unreliable laptops just by blowing all the dust out of the cooling fan/heatsink.

Kieran_Burns

TGOTB wrote:

Not sure, could be the hard disk. If you have a spare, well worth dropping that in and seeing what happens, when it gets to the stage that the problem can be reproduced predictably. Of all the components in a freesat box, the HDD is the only one with moving parts (which makes it much more susceptible to failure).

One other thing to check with electronic devices that seem to be going on the blink is the cooling. Are the vents full of dust? I've resurrected several slow/unreliable laptops just by blowing all the dust out of the cooling fan/heatsink.

Without wishing to sound contrary - I would look at the PSU rather than the disk as this is a favourite failure point, but the advice about cleaning out the dust is a very good one.

You can get compressed air cans to blow out all the vents and the mobo.

NGale

Virgin Media for me after Christmas! time to dump Sky and Talk Talk

tgotb

Kieran_Burns wrote:

Without wishing to sound contrary - I would look at the PSU rather than the disk as this is a favourite failure point, but the advice about cleaning out the dust is a very good one.

You can get compressed air cans to blow out all the vents and the mobo.

Good point; could definitely be the PSU.

If you're having repeated failures: Is your device in a dusty environment, or one with poor ventilation (eg a cupboard, or in the middle of a stack of boxes)? Mine lives in a cupboard with a bunch of other electronics, and I've drilled some 1" cooling holes in the back of the cupboard to allow a bit of convection...