advise needed in choosing a satellite set

faral

hi folks
im new to satellite field so excuse my ignorance.
im looking to buy a set, receiver+ dish, for my new home.my prime interest is FTA but in the future I might subscribe for pay tv. My lady wants to watch polish channels, my self English and french. problem is all of them are on 3 different satellites afaik. So my question is ,is it possible to have all of the above on 1 dish (im talking about hotbird astra and eutelsat)? next question is which receiver to choose? i doesnt need to be the most expensive but it has to do job properly,have a possibility to record and be easy to use
any advise will be highly appreciated
ps
actualy I have a sky installation already in place but I think this dish is very small and doesn't seem to be a good quality

tapfit2004

You could get a 80-90 cm or 1m dish with a multi lnb bracket and get Hotbird (13 east), Astra1 (19 east) and Astra2 (28 east) using a 4 way diseqc switch.

Hotbird has polish channels but not too much is free to air so you might need a subscription. Also has Italian and many other channels.

Astra1 has French channels but again for most of them you would need a subscription. Also has a lot of German channels and a lot of them are free to air.

Astra2 is the satellite that you already have with your Sky dish and it has a good bit of free to air stuff mostly in English as you probably already know.

There is another satellite at Eutelsat 5 West A which has a lot more free to air French and Italian channels. Look at this link and you can see the free channels near the bottom of the page. http://www.lyngsat.com/Eutelsat-5-West-A.html

You could use a second dish to pick up 5 west and use the fourth input of the diseqc switch to have the four satellites on the one box.

Getting a receiver is a different story. It depends on if you want a box that is simple and doesn't need too much setting up or want to go with a more advanced box like one running linux which take a bit of setting up but offer far more options like allowing you to use some subscription cards in them.

On the linux side something like a vu+ or a dreambox might suit you as they allow you to record using a hard drive and work well with some subscription cards.

I don't really know what the best simple box would be as I've been using the linux boxes for years but most of these boxes won't allow you use sub cards in them.

If you were going to get a subscription to the polish channels there is a lot of information on this forum already and a lot of people use them because they show English Premier league and are relatively cheap compared with sky.

The sky dish is a bit small for 13 east but you could probably get a decent enough signal on 5 west from it and use the other dish for 13, 19 and 28 east which would mean you'd only have to buy 1 extra dish.

faral

Thanks so much for really helpful reply.actually I'm thinking to buy amiko alien 2 as receiver but....previous occupier of this house left sky+box so maybe there is no need to buy any receiver? What do you think?

winston_1

faral wrote: »

Thanks so much for really helpful reply.actually I'm thinking to buy amiko alien 2 as receiver but....previous occupier of this house left sky+box so maybe there is no need to buy any receiver? What do you think?

A sky box can't be used for multi sat installations. It does not support diseqc among other things.

faral

winston_1 wrote: »

A sky box can't be used for multi sat installations. It does not support diseqc among other things.

ok, so alien will be my choice.