Confusing sattellite receiver setup

Hi

My old Sky+ box keeps playing up and because I only ever used it for the free to air channels, I decided to replace with with something under £30 from Amazon.

Has anyone experienced here how to setup these boxes, they are confusing as hell. If I only want to receive the same channels as those on Freesat, what transponder and satellite do I need to set it to?

I bought two cheap boxes to try them and eventually got one of them to work but its crazy the channels are all over the place unlike on Freesat or Sky. Can you normally delete channels e.g. adult ones and move them so that channel 2345 becomes channel 001 and set as my BBC News 24?

I'm thinking of replacing it with a Manhattan box for £40 odd as they have better reviews.

Thx.

The clue to your problems with the channel listings is contained here
"I bought two cheap boxes to try them"

They're not Freesat boxes, nor are they Sky boxes, and that means they don't use the Freesat electronic programme guide (EPG) or Sky's EPG.

The simple answer for you is to pick up a used Sky box from your local free ads or Facebook selling groups for free/£10-£20 and replace your old box with something more up-to-date.

The only additional thing to do is to transfer your viewing card to the new box. This will require a call to Sky to pair the card. That, or buy a box with a viewing card already in it. You should find that people who changed over to Sky Q have their old box and old Sky card as a matched pair. That would be the perfect choice for you.

Alternatively, go for a used Freesat box from Humax. They use the Freesat EPG. The boxes with a single sat connection on the rear are receivers/tuners only. Ones with two connections are the recorders. There's usually a hard drive in those and they offer the ability to pause/rewind live TV as well as recording.

So the existing sky+ HD box I have is an old ebay box I purchased some 11 years ago. As far as I understand, it does no longer requires a Sky viewing card to watch free to air channels, when I call sky they dont even have me on their database despite paying £15 or whatever it cost me back in 2010 and the card has never been replaced.

My point about the "cheap boxes" was more to understand the difference between a dedicated freesat box or any box capable of picking up a satellite signal. If the freesat box is limited to a certain number of channels, I would have thought that's not as good as something that can receive everything but you just need to know which satellite, transponder and other settings to go for.

u587162 said:

the difference between a dedicated freesat box or any box capable of picking up a satellite signal.

Click to expand...

A generic box will just receive whatever is transmitted and in whatever order they happen to be in.

A Freesat box will have the UK channels in the expected arrangement. It can receive all of the others as well if you really want them - but as the majority of those are in languages other then English, are intended for other countries or are encrypted, viewing those isn't particularly useful.

Unless I am misunderstanding this, Freesat is therefore no more than a "favourites list"? There is nothing technical about Freesat that sets it apart, to the extent that it is the manufacturer of the set top box that determines the functionality etc?

Seems like someone has created limited company, chosen which channels to put into a favourites list and called it Freesat? Even the nice user interface (UI EPG) comes from the manufacturer of the box.

Would that be a fair statement?

I can see why you think that, but there's a bit more to it than a favourites list.

Imagine if you will the public libraries with their vast collections of books. There was a time when those libraries each had their own way of organising their collections. Over time, standard ways of organising a library emerged.

Eventually the most dominant methods fought it out until one was adopted as the common standard. That's how we arrived at the Dewey Dimecimal System.

Once you understand the system, you can walk in to virtually any public library in the world and find a book by the same method.

Freesat isn't anything so grand, but it is the established standard for the UK's alternative for terrestrial broadcasting just as Freeview is the UK's standard for terrestrial. As such then, anything marketed as being Freesat must adhere to a core set of guidelines.

The public comes to expect things organise in a standard way. We drive on the left and (more or less) obey the same traffic rules such as giveway to the right. We use and buy by the same weights and measures. We no longer barter seashells versus deer antlers versus animal pelts because British money a common value.

You wrote your OP because the new satellite gear didn't adhere to Sky's version of an EPG arrangement. You've come to value the way things are organised, and you missed it when some new gear didn't follow a familiar pattern. The fact that Sky's EPG doesn't follow the exact order of Freesat is a minor point. The main thing is it isn't just a seemingly random jumble of channels.

Thanks for that explanation.

Do you know how I can add more channels to the freesat box which are more than just the 170 or so it promotes. If it doesn't show it in the settings, does that mean it is programmed to effectively lock me out from tuning into other channels which dont form part of the 170 promoted channels?

To start off with, you need to go in to SERVICES > Add Chnls

Next, you need to remember that you're probably using a regular Sky dish fixed and pointing at 28.2 degrees East. You'll have worked out for yourself then that you're only going to pick up the channels broadcast by the satellites in that group. Lyngsat is pretty useful in giving all the bits of info required to pick up stations that currently don't appear in Sky's channel list.

Most of what's available is religious channels and some foreign language stuff, but have a go and se what you can get.