The house we bought and moved into earlier in the year (in dept 86) has a satellite dish and although I’ve relied on the internet for TV, we’ve just shipped over our big 2 year old LG TV and or has its own integrated satellite TV receiver. I’ve connected the dish and tuned in loads of Freesat channels, which is good, but while I can watch the BBC News channel in SD, the HD BBC News Channel friend work. Other HD BBC channels work so I’m curious as to why the BBC News channel doesn’t. Any ideas? TIA
PS the satellite signal strength is 80% and signal quality is 100% according to the TV.
I had a place near you in Deux Sevres. We needed an 80cm dish and in the summer, we had reception issues with HD channels. Some are worse than others. You didn’t need to do a rescan when moving to France … its the same satellite you’re pointing at so it makes no difference. The worst HD channel for reception is ITV HD, so if you can receive this channel, you can get anything. Some BBC HD channels are worse than others. BBC4 HD seems to be the worst, followed by BBC News HD. If you rescanned during a storm, that may affect how many channels seen by the scan, but if it’s in the EPG, then you should be able to tune to it. Where I am now, in Aude, I have a 110cm dish and still have issues in the summer with HD channels, so it’s not unusual.
Another common issue for people who have done thier own install is not to have set the LNB Skew correctly. This can cause issues where some channels don’t work. As long as you can get easy access to the dish, checking LNB skew is very easy. Basically, the LNB has to be rotated from the vertical, one way or the other, by a certain fixed angle. The LNB collar will have a scale printed on it to guide you. There are websites that will give you direction, elevation and the LNB skew angle for any location for a particular satellite.
I’ve never used satellite TV before. The dish was not installed by me and I simply plugged it into the TV, which had not been connected to a dish before. The channel tuning and EPG were all automatic.
I haven’t changed the TV’s set location post code (West Herts).
Best thing is to use https://www.dishpointer.com/
This will give you elevation, azimuth and skew angle for the LNB. I put in Poitiers as that’s in Vienne, and it gave the following
This seems to make the azimuth 36.9 degrees east of south (magnetic), which is more than I expected. The good thing about this website is that you can zoom into the map, position the pointer exactly where your dish is, and maybe find a visible feature in the landscape along the line on the map to help in setting the azimuth angle. I did this on the dish I installed in Deux Sevres as I had an uninterrupted view of the corner of a building 200m away to point at. Worked perfectly.
While I haven’t been up a ladder to measure the dish, It’s not 80cm wide because the 40cm roof tiles behind it overlap by about 12cm and the two roof tiles are roughly the width of the dish. So I Estimate 65-68cm wide. Maybe 60cm.
I’ve retunedd again and can now watch BBC News HD but there is some occasional break up. It’s dry today but overcast. The dish does point through dune trees next door. I’ve attached some photos of the tuning screens:
Something is slightly marginal - it will show up on HD channels first as they need better signal quality. As the content on BBC News HD is no more edifying than BBC News SD and you get the channel in good weather you could elect to live with it.
I’d expect the other channels in the same multiplex to be affected - BBC One Scotland HD, BBC One Wales HD, BBC Scotland HD, BBC Four HD and Cbeebies HD.
A 60cm dish “should” be OK in 86 - you are just in/on the edge of the UK spot-beam footprint for 60cm. I have a 60cm dish in 56 which is normally fine- but I think we did lose some channels when we had absolutely torrential rain the last time we were over.
It’s possible that the installation pre-dates the re-focussing of the UK spot-beam (my memory says 2012 but I can’t find a reference for the moment) which had the effect of improving reception in the UK (and northern France) at the expense of southern France (well, it is a UK spot-beam) so the dish was probably fine at the time that it was installed.
If you want guaranteed uninterrupted viewing on all channels then check everything is aligned perfectly and that you have good quality coax, well made connections and maybe a new LNB (water can get in though that usually causes total failure). You could explore a 75cm or 80cm dish as well if you want but that might be overkill.
PS/Edit: BTW the transponder shown in your pic - 10714 - is Channel4/E4/More4+1/Film4, if you can get your box to show it the signal quality & strength for 11023H would be more use as that’s the one giving you problems (but they might be perfectly OK now the weather has cleared).
