Satellite Reception

Now that BBC, ITV, have moved to a new satellite (Astra 2E) with a spotlight focussed tightly around the U.K. are you now facing a loss of signal? We are in Grasse near Nice and have a 1.3m dish fitted with an Inverto Black Ultra low noise LNB and have complexly lost these channels. I’ve tried tweaking the satellite alignment with my professional meter with no luck. I’m seeing a medium signal with little of no signal quality for these channels. We also have the latest Freesat 4K receiver which has updated accordingly to the new HD channels. Anyone else having this problem?

I think it’s the change to HD. Less robust than SD signals

If your still recieving everything SD then it’s either tweaking the dish or a bigger dish to get the HD channels. Or just use the internet

I thought things had been on 2e for years

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Freesat has been using the tight UK spot beam for some time now. The further south and east you go the worse the signal gets. I’m in Carcassonne with a 1.2m dish and am having some issues. It’s the move to HD channels that’s made things worse as they tend to be on higher bitrate transponders which drop away quicker. Nice will be further out of the signal than Carcassonne so it’s no surprise you’re having issues. There are sometimes some things you can do to improve your signal. The simplest is to check that you have the correct LNB skew set. You can check this at dishpointer.com . It can make quite a difference if the skew is wrong. Another thing is to check the cable. Some installers use cheap TV style coax cable whereas you should be using something like WF100 cable.

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Thanks for the feedback. I think I will try a my spare LNB and try to tweak alignment and azimuth again. Thankfully I have a VPN to my cottage in the U.K. and so iPlayer, etc comes to the rescue!

As mentioned elsewhere we live in the PO where even a 1.6m dish is useless. In reality a decent internet connection and a decent VPN is all you need. Down here, right at the end of the line, fibre has yet to arrive. But our Orange ADSL connection works fine. It does help that we have a dedicated computer, set-up specifically for watching TV, integrated into our media center.

Oddly enough we do watch TV by satellite. We live in a mountaimous area and need a dish to watch French TV.