Box & Satellite Dish

white apples

Total newbie to using Satellites so sorry if this is a stupid question.

We recently moved into a new house on which there is a Satellite dish with the cable coming into the house and down to the TV area but there was no box or anything.

So I've borrowed a box to see if I can get any signal from the satellite i.e. freeview channels or whatever's available.

Did a deep scan and it's saying that there's 13 channels but those channels say "Channel Not Available". There's no remote or control to move the dish either so maybe it's pointing in the wrong direction but I would have thought whomever installed it to be stationary would have had it facing the right way.

Any help appreciated.

Sam Radford

You can't receive UK terrestrial Freeview channels with a satellite TV receiver and vice-versa. Connect a Sky Digibox. If you see UK programmes, the dish is correctly aligned on Astra-2. Otherwise it probably isn't (or there's a fault).

cyclopath2001

Try an FTA (i.e. general-purpose) satellite receiver. If the house was lived in by an East european it might be that the dish is pointing at a different satellite and scanning with a Sky box would get strange results. Most common satellites after Astra 28.5 (for Sky) would be Hotbird (13east) and Astra 19.2. Try scanning for each satellite and when the names of the channels match what you see, you'll know what you're on.

Most satellite dishes don't have motors. If they do, they're most often controlled by the FTA receiver.