Freesat Radio without TV to select channel

heathersonline

Hi Folks,

Quick question, my father in law has a dedicated music room, and wants to get BBC Radio in Stereo.

I've checked, and his Broadband service isnt good enough to stream a decent speed. He has a spare slot on his LNB as he has 2 standard sky boxes. I know I can run another line from the dish, what I'd like to know is if there is any receiver on the market which will display the channels on a screen on the receiver? There's no chance of getting a tv into this room, hes fought it for years and isn't gonna give in now! Basically I need to be able to locate channels wthout hooking the decoder up to a tv.

byte

Most basic FTA receivers have channel numbers on the display. Some of the more expensive ones have a dotmatrix display that shows the channel names also.

So, you could get a cheap FTA box that has a numeric display, tune it up somewhere that has a TV, and make a list of the channels with relevant numbers (re-arrange as necessary).

Ozzie

Has he Sky on both of the other standard boxes?

If he has NOT and is using it for the Free To Air Channels, then the BBC radio stations are there from channel 0101. I bought a Sky gnome on Ebay about two years ago and have it set up from an old sky FTV box. It's like a radio and picks up stations from the box. (You can listen to the TV channels, but it's really for the radio). There's no wiring to it, just a couple of connections at the back of the box. It's completely portable - he could bring it outside on a nice summer's day!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/oct/27/innovations.gadgets

Sky have stopped selling them now, but they're still out there.

heathersonline

He has sky subs on both boxes, however one of them is rarely used. So would this gnome gadget work on the less frequently used box? What I'm hoping to do is hook it up to his Amp, which is why I thought of adding an additional sky box

Sam Russell

The lidl box [SL65] would be ideal, it has RCA connectors for audio which would go to a hifi, and the display can be set up to give radio channels in a particular order. Very simple to operate, will come back as it was left, so tuned to R4, will stay tuned to R4. They are quite small. Lidl were selling them for €50 on their own. But any FTA box would do.

Tony

Even cheaper FTA boxes have digital audio out and as others have suggested all you need do is edit the channels so that Radio 1 is on ch 1 etc. Digital audio straight to the amp would be the way I'd go.