Take note everybody, the new Astra 2F satellite went online today, 23 November. You should now retune your receiver. I have taken this from their website:
'ASTRA 2F, the latest ASTRA satellite and the 52nd from operator SES, is now operational at 28.2°E. ASTRA 2F was launched in September to provide direct-to-home broadcasting across Europe and sub-Saharan Africa – in particular to the UK and Ireland – as well as high speed satellite internet for SES Broadband. ASTRA 2F is the first of a new generation of craft at 28.2°E to replace the existing satellites at this position'
For people worried about the rumours that Freesat would disappear before Christmas, today is the day that would have happened. Mind you, if the Mayans were right and we've only got until 21 December, better not worry too much about it then.
Thanx, Brain!
so it did not disappear, no broken receiver but got my Radio 4 back...
Just do a manual retune from the menu. No rescan necessary, the satellite remains at 28.2E as long as it does not bump into one of the many bits of scrap floating around up there, such as Astra 2D...
OK, thanks. I have friends with one of these FreeSat decoders. Do they need to invite it to rescan for channels? Or will they continue to work on the same frequencies?
No difference. It is just that the world was abuzz with rumours that Freesat would be closed down about now, the footprint to cover the UK only, etc. The switch over made little difference except the new channels, now we'll be OK for a few years until the next round of rumours begins...
I happen to have taken delivery of a Humax FreeSat+ decoder on Friday. I live near Grenoble, so pretty far south. Anyway, I moved the satellite antenna cable and the SCART (I know, I know) across to the FreeSat box, turned it on, and all I had to do was answer Yes a few times and enter an Ayrshire postcode. In no time at all the decoder found a squillion stations, radio too, and I was in business. Very impressive, and the spousal unit is happy.
I guess my question is whether the tuning was made easier by this new satellite? As far as I knew in the past I was tuned to 2D.
Done and dusted Mark, only new carp (please rearrange letters yourself). My retune was less than five minutes and all is up and running.
Thank you for the warning, Brian. Apart from BBC3, things seem to be OK, but I'm hoping that they won't do anything dastardly in the night, because I want to record that interesting looking documentary on the early Stones on BBC2 tonight (well, midnight - is that tonight or tomorrow monring?).
Thank you for the info Brian.
Few new channels, mostly advertisers, evangelists and other thins are more a waste of space than any real use. There seems to be a couple of new plus channels, so beyond +1 we are now finding increasing numbers of +2 as well. The outcome is that if I look through Freesat, French transmissions and the other receiver with German, Italian, Spanish and hundreds of Arabic stations I find that with one language or another it is possible to watch CSI almost round the clock!
Yes, this one is because it is actually the new satellite itself going into full operation. If you look at the Astra site and follow 28.2°E (or any other) satellite transmission details you'll see that there are fairly regular updates, for instance I think it was Channel 5 changed a while back so that when people looked at the programme schedule they might have thought it had gone, but it had just shifted to another position in the list along with the frequency. In the end you still get it. Updating only gives you new channels really.
There was a satellite change earlier in the month and I had to retune for BBC channels and BBC radio-is this another one?