Simon Reeve

Philex Satellite Kit

In an effort to maintain my Italian language skills, I thought I’d get a satellite dish to watch the news and anything else available.  The hope is my son can pick up the language too.  Whilst out shopping at a B&Q warehouse I stumbled across a very affordable satellite TV kit in a box, and that’s where the story starts…

Now I must point out, I knew nothing about installing a satellite dish, but am a very capable DIYer.  This wasn’t a planned activity, just triggered by the impulse purchase of the kit.  The kit, a Philex brand, consists a set top box, some cable and a 60 “Zone 2″ dish complete with bracket and LNB.  There’s instructions, all be it basic, and the necessary screws and connectors. 

I enquired about having it fitted professionally and quotes of £150 seemed to be the norm.  One fitter did suggest to install DIY was very difficult for a lay person.  It was that remark, that wound me up to do it myself.

The first thing to do was to check I have a clear line of sight to the satellites Hotbird 6/7/8 13° East.  This was a bit difficult with a small orienteering compass, protractor and a piece of string, but felt confident enough.  The problem for me is a tree covered hill in front of the house.  I found a very useful site http://www.dishpointer.com which is BRILLIANT.  It uses Google to overlay the line of sight to your selected satellite from your selected location.  It proved very useful and accurate.  Below is a widget from the site showing you the line of sight from Stonehenge UK to Hotbird 6/7/8 13° East.

Looking around the web, there’s a lot sites and pages (including this one now?) guiding you through the process.  They all recommend a satellite finder meter, which my kit didn’t have.  Since the set top box has a meter built in, I thought I’d use that.

With the dish secured to the wall, pointing roughly in the right direction, I set up a portable telly and the set top box.  Then the fun and games started.  Firstly, setting the elevation? There’s a guide on the bracket, but it’s about as clear as mud as to how to use it.  Since the dish is offset, you can’t do it by looking at the angle of the dish.  Having made a guess, I started slightly higher and slowly panned from left to right, then down, then left to right, then down, then……..etc, etc.

Nothing!!  I soon realised to find a signal this way was hopeless.  The meter on the set top box updates every 5 seconds and so I gave up for the day.

Next day, off to B&Q to get a satellite finder, one of those analogue meters.  Plugged it in, still setting up my portable telly and off I go again.  After a while, there was the slight increase in sound from the meter as promised!  Elation – got a signal…  Played around to make sure max signal strength on a few of the channels. It was quite satisfying to get a signal from something so far away.

How many channels????

Having routed the cable to the telly in the lounge and once comfy, I sat down to see what channels I could get after kicking the set top box off on a ‘Blind Search’ of 13° East.  Loads of Channels! HOW MANY??? Here lies the problem, there’s so many, I doubt I’ll ever go through them all and mark the ones I want.  The box does allow you to filter by encrypted, satellite, etc, but you’d still need some patience to go through them. There are two very useful sites for listing what you can and can’t get.

http://www.lyngsat.com/ – very up to date and referenced by lots of self help guides.
http://en.kingofsat.net/- My preferred site for Europe, since it’s filtering options on the listings are very flexible.

I’ve favouritised the mainstream Italian channels, RAI 1,2,3, ReteQuatro, Canale 5, Italia 1, and Rai GULP!  A somewhat repetitive Italian CBeebies type channel.  Great for toddlers, since a few of the programs are English speaking programs, like Little Princess, dubbed into Italian.

I’ve since bought a Technomate dish motor now and might get round to fitting that one day….How hard can it be

I hope this little blog inspires anyone else to have a go.