My old 80cm dish is just hanging there on the wall, giving me Sky news and one or two other useless channels. So what I thought was, maybe I could point it at a French satellite. Does anyone know the compass "coordinates" for this, to save me wagging it about too much???
Of course, it is France after all ;-)
Perhaps there is some hope then (but I won't be holding my breath).
Our whole commune is only 340, the next closest in the pylon's range are smaller still and the one other 'village' along the way is well under 100. So three communes and part of a village that had patchy cover a year ago are now well covered and have no weather problems as recent nasty storms have proven. It is matter of where you stand in the list.
You must be fairly close to Lyon? We are nearly an hour away from our nearest real city (Bergerac is a largish town really) Perigueux which is tiny in comparison to Lyon and even the edge of Bordeaux is over one and a half hours away, so we are not logically a priority area. You are probably part of a set of rings round the city that will be expanded outwards, which is apparently how it works in France at present.
I hope you are right Brian. At the moment this is a black spot as far as mobile coverage is concerned. As I type, we are on Day 3 of having no signal at all after the storm on Monday. Not sure what the population density is where you are but our village has a total population of 800 and all w have is a basic 2G transmitter operated by SFR on behalf of the big 3 (Bouygues, Orange, SFR), those people using the other sub-operators such as Free, don't get a signal.
Steve, the pylon building programme here in France to give total mobile cover is very ambitious. Whereas last year by the time I was 1km away from home I had no signal. The new pylon, unsightly pustule it may be, means I can now wander where I like in the forest and have a perfect signal. Because they were behind even Portugal and Greece, they have their fingers out now and are putting the things up at a rate of knots unprecedented here. You will no doubt skip past 3G, have 4G at the worst and on from there quite soon. The mobile service providers know where their bread is buttered and have already one of the highest per capita mobile user rates in Europe, the technology for all apparatus that uses it is there, its distribution has been the problem. I have sat in the forest with a tablet writing comments on here (until I smashed the thing :-( ) as though sitting at home with a cable connection. This was a dead patch where logically one would have thought there would be little interest in investment in it but it is clearly the opposite.
We don't even have a 3G signal in our village so I doubt 5G/6G would be a solution here. What they need is to find a way of superimposing a data signal across the mains supply that will pass across the various transformers along the way and that won't cause interference everywhere.
Here in 24 they published a map of re-cabling all (?) telephone lines over 12 years last year. We are in one of the patches not even included despite the word 'all'. That is why the mobile phone network is interesting. If a phone works, then a smart TV on the same receiving system is great. If the new lines are going to be over a decade (at the earliest, if ever) then this going to be available first anyway.
The problem here is the VERY slow line speed - less than 1mb. So on-line services are not really an option. They are supposed to be putting in new cables soon which should improve things but this is deepest 64, so there's no rush(!).
I've been watching Japanese TV this evening! :-)
We have a friend in Geneva who does research into sound systems at the university. He is the kind of geek who literally builds his own speakers for his sound system. The pair he has at home are worth around CHF 20k (€16.5k)! So he really does know his stuff. I was talking about the TV stuff over dinner with my OH and she replied when she was there a month ago she was talking to him (we always stay at his place) about our lack of French TV here. He said not to worry because come 6G telephony and the signal changes for the new services, smart TVs will get just about anything. It would appear that their laboratory in the university is already using enhanced 5G and that 6G is about two years away. He also said that there will be more or less hundreds of Filmon and Zattoo pay for services with thousands of channels on offer but suspects it will cost. However, the punchline is that he told her that satellite services will become obsolete soon. I am not technical in the slightest but having seen how fast things have moved recently can swallow that.
On the FRANSAT website it identifies a different satellite :>
Voici quelques informations afin de régler précisément votre parabole sur le satellite Eutelsat 5WA (ATLANTIC BIRD 3) à 5° Ouest.
http://www.fransat.fr/comment-ca-marche/reglages-de-la-parabole/?page=55
Souldn't have thought so, will power mine up and check it is still working
Fair enough, but when we arrived we knew no better and what I have learned on SFN is that ultimately nobody else is actually better. So we stuck to the devil we know.
The satellite box I've got is a FRANSAT gadget with a card in it that says "la TNT gratuite par satellite" and I'm pointing at Astra 19.2E. Still none of the "main" French channels. Do I need a different card I wonder? (They don't come up on the scan of that satellite.)
Orange?
TNTsat is available on Astra at 19.2° E acc http://www.tntsat.tv/tnt-sat-decodeur-materiel-installation/installer-parabole-astra.htm
Go to your local TV specialist. Tell them you want to watch French TV but you don't want to pay for Canal+. Wait for suddden intake of breath (why do even french people want to watch french TV). Buy satellite TNT box from them and the services of their satellite technician. Problem soved and then wait until next year for the competition for the best Boulangère de France.
Strange, the three I gave coordinates for are the choices for French TV if you have Orange. They should be the same for all providers but who knows what the mysteries of satellite reception are? If not working, look at your provider's site. Try the coordinates again. If that does not work drink something strong.
To save you the bother, I gave you Lyngsat coordinates which is what Hadyn is recommending. I just happen to have them on file for similar reasons to you. Difference here is our French TV vanished pushing two years ago and when we eventually got an Orange guy here even he couldn't get it back. We have Hotbird for German and Italian, but there is zilch French on there. An installer who guaranteed he could get it all back left unpaid after a couple of hours checking the cable, LNB, swearing at the dish and generally getting bad tempered.
snigger!