Can anyone give us advice on the best dish to buy as we don't have a sky box and also not bothered about it being 12 volt. Just been to N Yorks with bad reception so thinking about buying a portable dish.
Get a standard Triax Sky Dish (if you intend to use it only in the UK) and a cheap digibox. The get a freesat card or if you have multiroom take it with you. A tripod is also a good idea.
The get a freesat card or if you have multiroom take it with you.
Are you saying that if you have Sky multi room you can put this in the receiver and get your channels Thought you could only do this with a sky box ??
Went to B&Q the other week and bought a 60cm Satellite kit for Free to Air Channels, will be trying it out soon as Ive just come back from the Cotswolds and only had Channel 5
Sorry, I meant you can take the multiroom box with you and just plug it into your mobile sky dish. Its against sky's rules but no one I know has been found out. apparently they can check your box now and again to see if it is connected to your phone. Remember there are now two types of box, Freesat and Sky Freesat - Freesat is an ITV/BBC set up, Sky Freesay is Skys channels plus a few more. If you have a sky digibox then you need to get a freesat card as you cant get C5 without it. Apaprently C4 is now on the line up as free to view as is More 4 and E4. The line up this year for Sky freesat is now improved since C4 are out of contracts with Sky.
We just come back from the first weekend away with a suitcase satelitte dish thingy.
We bought it from maplins after recomendations from here and its picture was better than our homes picture!
We didn't get it for sky either just to have a decent picture, i would defintely recommend it.
The phone line only needs to be connected to the sky box for the first twelve months of the sky contract, after that, the phone line can be disconnected. I have a dish (complete with the LNB) on a tripod, a second hand sky box from ebay and a second hand freesat card from ebay for my caravan and all is well! The kids couldn't do without it, and me!
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If your thinking of going down the satellite route. do it right the first time. Get a skydish & mount it on a tripod. get a skybox with remote control. 10m of cable or more. & Weatherproof Touring Socket for the outside of the van. & a magic eye if needed. You should get all this for about £70 of ebay.
I have put my skybox under the seating with the magic eye on the side were the tv is.
My skydish is mounted on a speaker stand. the dish can be moved into any direction. up/down.left/right & go upto about 10feet high.
I have put a Weatherproof Touring Socket with sky connection on the outside of the van.
I run with a long cable becouse sometimes the dish as to be moved away from the van to get clear signal.
I take my sky card from home. This will get you just about everything you subscribe to except pay per view/skysports/skymovies.
When dish is setup thats it. Get a good sat finder if needed.
I have had the (sat in a box) & thats were it will stay. In the box in the shed. The dish would not keep still in a little bit of wind so lost signal. The freesat box was a pain to setup. could not get C5.
We have this one from Maplin at the time we bought it it was the only one they had. It is currently at £100 but does come up in sales regularly for about £70. The advantage of this over the cheaper ones is that it is so easy to mount the dish. It comes with rubber suckers to mount to the side or roof of the van, a clamp for mounting to the jockey wheel or awning poles etc... Even a bracket for bolting on permanantly. We find it easy to set up and picture quality is excellent. Runs on 12 volt but includes a mains adapter.
Also in regard to the last poster, C4 and C5 have not been available on freesat until recently.
We've had a suitcase for 3 years and never had a problem with wind. We did have some agro in torrential rain once as the rain streaming over the dish seemed to weaken the signal. We do find that you need to make sure all the thumb screws are really tight. Maplin show 3 different suitcases on their site at the moment and ours is the most expensive of the three. I have seen the cheaper dish, but not the decoder. It looks like it would be a bugger to secure as it does not have all the accessories of the more expensive model. I would recommend keeping an eye on the Maplin website as the £100 ones do come up in the B grade and on offer regularly.
I have the one from B&Q and use it every time we go away. Can't miss Match of the Day. I choose this one as it was big enough to work in France, where we watched the Olympics, during breakfast (and when it rained). Picture is perfect on our £99 flatscreen and no more snowey pictures. http://www.dishpointer.com/ Use this site before you go away so it tells you which way to point the dish, I just use a compass and if I can find the campsite on Googleearth I can phisically see where the dish should be pointing. Should only take about 5 mins max to get a picture sorted.