That good, eh? 
Send me your adress they are all yours 
1 Like
I think I’ll pass, thanks all the same.
Off to see where I can get a 120cm or larger dish and dual LNB.
Farnell France will seeing some of my money as well for decent cable.
1 Like
Not sure exactly where you are in France so don’t have much idea of how big a dish you will need, but the larger the better. I had a good 80cm dish with good quality low noise LNB in southern Deux Sevres and it was OK on HD channels, but that was six years ago. Here, near Carcassonne I have a 110cm steel dish with good quality LNB, but it’s having issues with HD channels even after I got a better LNB.
I’ve been looking recently at dishes and will probably get a 130cm+ fibreglass offset dish with side arms that can have a matched C120 feedhorn fitted. Won’t happen until later in the year though.
1 Like
SE 47.
I think I have a combination of the following issues:
-
HD channels on Astra 28.2° F/G being slightly “quieter” than they were on D/F.
-
10 year old dish and LNB.
-
20 metre run of Bricoshed bargain brand co-ax cable.
Ah. A very beautiful area of France. Haven’t been there in many years, but it’s on my list of areas to visit, and not a huge distance from where I am. I think where you are a 120cm dish will be plenty.
This will be one of your biggest issues. Cheap coax, designed for UHF tv frequencies is awful for a satellite feed. Replace it with the WF100 cable and connectors from Farnell. If it’s possible to reduce the size of the able run as well, that will help.
1 Like
It isn’t necessary to use a Sky or Freesat box to receive FTA (free to air) transmissions. There are many better alternatives.
For example, I have a VU+ Uno 4k box with which I can record 8 channels simultaneously.
I must admit the VU+ boxes are aimed at hobbyists so need a bit of knowledge to set up, but there are other plug and play machines available. Any HD capable satellite receiver will do the job.
Yes plenty of android boxes out there with questionable results, I had one that would seize and stop responding.
I cant get BBC i player any longer either and thats using PIA VPN service. Anyone else having trouble?
The Android based boxes are, in general, pretty awful. The VU+ boxes along with others such as Octagon, Dreambox, Gigabyte etc are very good. They’re not Android based and use Broadcom STB SOCs. They are Linux based with a mature driver layer from Broadcom. There are various software variants available for these boxes such as OpenPLI or Enigma. The only issues with these boxes revolve around support for series links, which are not as reliable as on other boxes because of patent issues related to the processing of XSI. These patents should expire in a year or two I think.
1 Like
No wonder the guillotine was busy.
You are of course correct. I should have posted a warning.
The cheaper Chinese boxes are iffy. I had to ditch a Hellobox.
I use nordvpn and get all the uk channels without any problems…………. touching lots of wood 
I’m using ExpressVPN at the mo, and it works just fine with all the players as well. I used to use NordVPN and it (almost) always worked fine for me as well. Both were used via a VPN router.
I did a factory reset and reinstalled PIA VPN. The internet is patchy due to the weather at the moment but will try i player again later. It worked a charm to start with.
Interesting John, will take a look.
Yes I used to use expressvpn and also found that worked well. Only reason I changed was better deal on with nord. Needless to say it’ll probably be a better deal with express next time the only one i’d avoid like the plague is purevpn - utter garbage and never really worked!
I was interested in PIA VPN when I switched to ExpressVPN. I would be interested in your thoughts on it once you’ve used it for a while. I only switched because I could get abetter deal with ExpressVPN and had tried it for a month. Next time I’ll see what sort of deal I can get with NordVPN again and switch back if it’s good, or maybe try PIA ?
1 Like
I seem, almost by accident, to have found a satisfactory outcome for myself. I have radio and tv by satellite and radio by internet, they both fail now and again for different reasons but have never, in my experience, power cuts apart, found them both to fail at the same time.
I also discovered yesterday, that the internet lags behind the satellite, so when listening via satellite and missing something that was said, could get an instant repeat by switching the internet on.
How is it different technically? Had a quick look but where the product fits in the chain and whether it still also needs a vpn, or a permanently connected pc, is not clear.