Thursday, Nov 03, 2005 at 17:20
Sky Pilot,
On trip to
Broome we landed at several spots where the ordinary
TV antennae was useless.
Sometimes because there was no reception, or at best intermittent reception or only one channel was being beamed in .
Whilst at
Barn Hill station (the one on 60 minutes with the 2 bowling greens) we had very poor reception and it was around footie final time.
Spoke to a guy who had a
satellite dish outside his van and he showed me the picture he was getting (PERFECTLY CLEAR), which turned out to be
St George versus??. He became my new best friend!!
He had purchased (along with 60 others from the park over previous couple of weeks) the whole unit from Johnny's Electronics at
Katherine and cost including postage was $565.
I bought
mine on the way back at
Katherine, and got the dish +LNB unit, decoder box, remote control and cables + a 2 hour familarisation demo, together with a chart showing the
satellite Location map throughout Australia.
Basically you need to buy a compass to aim the
satellite dish in the right direction.
Next step is to manually set (move by hand) the elevation depending what area you are in , and once green boxes replace red boxes you have picked up the signal.
The LNB attached to dish then needs to be twisted to point to a scale which increases the green boxes as high as possible.
When positioning the dish it is important not to have any trees or palm fronds etc in the way. I got 2 @ 10m with a joiner of cable so that I could move it to a suitable spot.
The cable is attached to the bottom of the LNB unit and plugs into the antennae connector on the van.
What I found was that in most parks others had dishes and were only too happy to assist in the set up.
No card is needed for the decoder box from Johnny's as the
TV stations are all set. There was all ABC and SBS channels throughout Oz , Imparja 7 Central and WIN W.A. As
well there were 100's of radio stations and we were able to pick up macca on a sunday when our normal radio gave us no reception at all during the day.
The beauty of having ABC or SBS throughout oz was that if I turned it on too late for one lot I could pick it up on say NT or WA later.
We retained our ordinary antennae for use in major areas where reception was no problem.
It was a good investment.
The chart with positions at this site (thanks Volante) will be of great assistance in setting up at various
places in the future.
Pedro
AnswerID:
137629
Follow Up By: slow mower - Thursday, Nov 03, 2005 at 18:03
Thursday, Nov 03, 2005 at 18:03
Hi pedro, received your request yo contact you via link. At this stage I'm unable to do that. You can e-mail me at ppdg@chgariot.net.au b.t.w. it's my understanding that the 'data' encoded into your receiver will cease to function in the very near future (something to do with changing the IRDETO version or something) and you WILL require a card to enable conitinued fta viewing.
FollowupID:
391298
Follow Up By: Volante - Thursday, Nov 03, 2005 at 18:37
Thursday, Nov 03, 2005 at 18:37
Buying a decoder box without a card slot is useless as next year Optus are changing the cards and boxes without card slots will be useless. Dealers selling boxes without card slots are crooks as they are dumping all these boxes as the majority of people know they will be totally useless next year. When the D1 Optus
satellite launches you can use the receivers without card slots for door stops. If you buy a box make sure you buy an Emtech/Homecast or Strong
FollowupID:
391306
Follow Up By: wresat - Friday, Nov 04, 2005 at 06:48
Friday, Nov 04, 2005 at 06:48
"No card is needed for the decoder box from Johnny's as the
TV stations are all set"
Oh dear.....That doesn't sound too good for the future!!!
FollowupID:
391364