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 Topic: Sky satellite dish in caravan
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04/2/2025 at 7:57am
Location: Worcestershire
Outfit: Buccaneer Cruiser
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You could use NOWTV to stream although we have a sat dish. We use Three and unlimited data cost £15 per month on a rolling contract.
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04/2/2025 at 8:12am
Location: Liverpool
Outfit: Swift Challenger 560
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If you already have all the satellite equipment and a sky subscription then that is probably the easiest way of getting Sky for you.
Several years ago we switched to Now TV Sports as it was a lot cheaper for us than paying for Sky, and now we stream TV through an Amazon Firestick when we are away in the caravan. You do need a lot of data, I would say that we use about 6GB of data a day when we are away in the caravan, watching maybe a couple of hours of TV a night and also using the data for other things like video calls, emails, browsing the internet etc. If we are away in winter with the dark nights, then we would probably watch a bit more than that and therefore use more data. We have the Firestick set to stream at the lowest resolution which uses the least data, and for weekends away we usually pop one of our SIM cards from our phones into our TP Link 4G router as we find we get a better signal from it than just from tethering to our phones, especially in poor signal areas. We both have 25GB of data on our phones so together, this is enough to cover a few weekends away a month. However, when we are away for a longer holiday, we buy whatever cheap prepaid SIM we can get from eBay with a good chunk of data, for example last summer, when we were away for a month, we bought a preloaded 300GB Voxi SIM on eBay for £6 and that lasted us for the whole month. Deals like this are not always available though, and sometimes it can be as much as £20 for a similar amount of data.
It sounds from your posts on this forum that you are a dab hand at setting up the satellite and that all you are restricted by when choosing a campsite is line of sight in the direction of the satellite. You can check that on Google maps and be pretty confident when you arrive on site that you will be able to get a signal. However, it is not always easy to check if you will get a decent enough 4G signal for streaming. The main providers have coverage maps on their websites that show the areas they cover but unfortunately, just because they have a signal in an area, doesn’t mean it is good enough for streaming, and you may find you get a lot of buffering when trying to watch television, which can be frustrating. When we are going away for a longer period, and therefore buying a SIM card especially for the router, we wait until we get to the area where we are going and check what network has the fastest signal. My phone is on EE and my husband is on Vodafone so we can check the speed of those through our phones, and we sometimes also ask anyone we see on site using their phone about what network they are on and what speed they are getting before we decide what SIM to buy. To give you an example of how it varies. On one of our favourite sites for a weekend away, my husband can get speeds of 3mbps (not enough for reliable streaming without buffering) on Vodafone, but I can get speeds of 70mbps on EE, so when we are at that site we always use my SIM. Another of our favourite weekend sites in the opposite direction from where we live gives me 7mbps speeds on EE, but my husband gets a whopping 124mbps on Vodafone. As we are creatures of habit and often revisit sites, we keep a record of 4g speeds on every site we visit for both EE and Vodafone (I know, we are very sad people!) so we often know before we go which network will be best, and whether we will be able to get a decent enough signal for streaming. However, if we go somewhere new, it is impossible to tell before we get there whether we will be able to stream or not. I know you travel around a lot, so this level of uncertainty about whether you can get a fast enough 4g signal for streaming might not be for you.
If what you have already got works for you and you are not looking to change your sky subscription to something like NowTV, then I would stick with it.
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Pixie
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28/2/2025 at 8:41pm
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For many years we carted a 60cm satellite dish down to the cote d Azur for the Freesat channels, then they introduced the Spot Beam, so we had to move to a 1m Dish, although even with a 1m dish, being well beyond the footprint for the signal, would mean some days you would get a picture, and others you would not.
The last time we used the dish in France was June 2019, and to be fair it did work fine most days down at Frejus.
But I have now decided to ditch the dish, and I am considering investing in Starlink Roam Mini.
The dish, well square flat plate antenna is a lot smaller than a 30cm dish, and is of course flat at a max of 4cm in thickness.
It's £400 for the kit, although cheaper refurbished kits are available.
The cheapest subscription is £50 per month, but you can cancel the subscription after the first month, and then pack away the kit for the next holiday.
The subscription is bound to drop in price in the coming years, but even at £50 I would be ok with that for my annual holiday, in fact when Starlink first became available to UK back in 2021 subscription was £90, so in just 4 years it is almost half that price now.
And of course the alignment of the antenna is fully automatic with Starlink, so no more squinting in the mid day sun to find Astra 2 at 28.2 East with an elevation of 25 degree or so, whats not to like!.
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via mobile 03/2/2025 at 11:03am
