B&Q satellite dish & receiver kit for £39.99

Steve_xx

I bought a Philex satellite kit from B&Q last week. It comes complete with dish (60cm), cable and receiver. It's a cracking bit of kit and we've got it up and running and we're very pleased with it as our first venture into satellite.

The only minus point is that it doesn't come with a satellite finder, but we have borrowed one and so were able to point it at the correct satellite after a bit of fiddling about. You can buy them for aroung £5 - £10 I think.

Oddly, and unlike Freeview, the Dave channel is encrypted. I'm not sure why that is? Also we thought that were weren't able to receive BBC3 & 4 on it, but later noted that CBBC and the CBeebies channel changes to BBC3 & 4 in the evenings, so no problem there.

Lütz_Pangaloo

Steve_xx wrote: »

I bought a Philex satellite kit from B&Q last week. It comes complete with dish (60cm), cable and receiver. It's a cracking bit of kit and we've got it up and running and we're very pleased with it as our first venture into satellite.

The only minus point is that it doesn't come with a satellite finder, but we have borrowed one and so were able to point it at the correct satellite after a bit of fiddling about. You can buy them for aroung £5 - £10 I think.

Oddly, and unlike Freeview, the Dave channel is encrypted. I'm not sure why that is? Also we thought that were weren't able to receive BBC3 & 4 on it, but later noted that CBBC and the CBeebies channel changes to BBC3 & 4 in the evenings, so no problem there.

Nice one - £40 for the whole shebang is pretty good.

You're right - as it stands at the moment Dave, FiveUS and Fiver (which are all available on Freeview) are still tied to the Sky platform, as was Five until recently - when their contact ends I imagine they will swap to Freesat.

But even though there are quite a few other FTA (free to air) channels available on the Astra cluster at 28.2E (where your dish is pointing), there are only really two reasons to go out and get Freesat;

1) You can't get a decent Freeview signal where you are (which probably will change on switchover when the digital signal is boosted 10x).

2) You have a HD telly and want some live HD content. ITV HD and BBC HD do look very nice at 1080i (their broadcast resolution), and soon C4 HD will be available on Freesat (it is on Sky at the moment). The HD channels are also transmitted with 5.1 surround sound, so if you have the kit they sound better too.

Bear in mind that the Philex is a FTA receiver, not a Freesat one, so as it stands it can't use the 7 day Freesat EPG like you would get on a Freeview box. This might change with a firmware update like my Fortec Passion HD receiver.

I bought my Fortec to see the Olympics on BBC HD, so wasn't bothered about the EPG, but Fortec have just released a new firmware that enables the Freesat EPG on all their HD boxes.

If you fancy HD you could use the same dish and LNB (no realignment needed), but the cheapest I've seen the Fortec receivers go for on Ebay is £75 - probably more now they can use the Freesat EPG.

Steve_xx

Thanks for your comments.

We had Freeview before this and it was fine, except that for most of the time we couldn't get BBC4. I guess we would have needed to have someone adjust the aerial and the cost of having that done wold have exceeded the £40 I spent on this kit. Now we can get BBC4 just fine. Also, I mounted the dish at stepladder height, so no problems there if it ever needs adjusting.

I also like the news channels, ie Al Jazeera, Russia Today, Bloomberg etc.

I did it for a bit of an experiment really. Before I saw this kit in B&Q I was looking at a similar offering in Maplin, but that was £140 and I was thinking it wasn't bad for the price! I'd have been a tad upset had I bought it and then saw the B&Q kit for £40. The only difference between the two kits was that the Maplin kit had the satellite finder gizmo inclusive. However, that's not worth an extra £100.

I'm not at all bothered about the HD thing. The picture on the TV as it is, is just fine for me.

mac1611

Can I just clarify something. Is the B&Q one a HD Receiver or is it just standard. There is a huge difference in price between SD and HD
Anyone know ?

Steve_xx

I believe that it is the standard kit, not HD.

savemoney

It wont be HD for that price

Steve_xx

You are correct. It is standard definition, not HD.

MiserlyMartin

Interesting that Fortec have written new s/ware to take advantage of the freesat EPG. I thought there were some kind of licensing issues with it that tied the freesat EPG into the official freesat boxes only. maybe I am wrong. I have a Technomate 9100 and somebody has made a freesat EPG plug in for that too, but I would expect that as its linux based.

savemoney

My Humax freesat HDR can do freesat and non freesat mode, not that non freesat mode is much good

top-timm

what a great buy... what other channels can you recieve,

Steve_xx

Here is a link to the channels, both TV & Radio that you can get:

http://www.radioandtelly.co.uk/freesatchannels.html

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