Freesat

Well after years of talking about putting up a satellite dish to get Freesat TV from the BBC and ITV, I finally took the plunge and did it.

To be honest there is quite a bit of work required to set things up. The biggest job was running a second cable from the dish to each TV in the house. I want to keep the existing coax for DTT(Saorview). So now I have 2 coax cables from the satellite dish and one coax for DTT. Plus a Cat5! As I was pushing cables from the attic to the down stairs between the plaster board and the installation, I never wanted to do this job again.

In terms of cost and what I bought. 50 euro for a quad LNB and 60cm dish from Powercity. 100 meters for RG6(black) from N D Electrical Wholesalers, 14 euro and F type connectors (70 cent each). All small costs but it took me one full day to do the cable runs.

I bought the cheapest HD box I could find in Powercity - 100 euro. There are some very cheap boxes available in the UK. I need to do a bit more research on boxes, but the idea of the two cables from the LNB, is to record on one and watch on the other. There are also now boxes with Ethernet connections, for Internet access. BBC iPlayer is not going to work with an IP address from the Republic. Also now there are Saorview and Freesat boxes in one.

Putting up the dish itself was quite straight forward. A great site that helped me get set up the box is: www.dishpointer.com. It even gives you a green line for giving you an idea of the general direction to point the dish in.

Once I set the elevation on the dish, I used a sat finder to get a rough idea of the direction and then fine tuned it afterwards. The sat finder is very useful as you can use it while moving the dish. The sat finder is powered from the satellite box and is placed inline near the dish. So you can view the sat finder while moving the dish. You really do need a sat finder, I couldn't imagine doing it without one.

Next step is putting up my antenna to get DTT. Once I have my DTT (Saorview) and Freesat, it will be time to declare independence and no more cable bills - except for the TV license of course.