FreeSat / FoxSat / PVR quandaries

After getting my 37" Pany plasma 720p TV, and loving it, i've been annoyed with the poor signal in my area - i had a quote recently, and naturally enough the guy told me i needed a better quality, larger, higher placed high-gain ariel, for which he quoted £175 PLUS VAT... :( (Which includes fitting it etc). We do seemingly live in a weak signal area (trees around, in a bit of a dip, long distance from transmitter etc).
Digital TV with a weak signal is much much worse than analogue with a weak signal - you get audio squeaks, bizzare artifacting and lines all over the place. Not good.

I do have a satellite dish on the side of the house doing nothing, from the previous owner, and am now seriously tempted to use it via Humax's Foxsat range. TR review here.
It looks good, and overall i'd be more interested in the PVR Foxsat than just the reciever, although the PVR is £300, the other is £150 (and i'm certain i'd buy from Richer Sounds, i love 'em).
My feeling is that £300 spent on a FreeSat PVR will be better than £200ish on re-aligning my ariel.

I'd just also mention that i have a Sky box, as well as a Sky+ box, sitting in my attic doing nothing, and my understanding is that i cant do anything with them (stupid Sky).

Is my regular Sky dish likely to work perfectly with the Humax, or are there any pitfalls i need to be aware of?

Thanks, as always, in advance!

Don't forget that you'll need two lnb feeds to use both tuners in the foxsat-hdr. If you haven't had a sky+ box you'll probably only have a single LNB on the dish, and would need to replace it and get an extra cable run. If your terrestrial tv aerial points through trees you might find that even upgrading the aerial gives you problems particularly in wet weather when the leaves are on the trees, so the satellite route might be 'safer'.

You should be able to use an old sky box to receive free satellite channels without a sky subscription, although you may need a freesat viewing card to access some of them. You have to pay Sky to enable the Sky+ recording feature though.

HTH

A while ago I was faced with a similar issue - duff reception and a redundant sat dish on the side of the house from a previous owner. I decided to buy a Humax HDCI2000 sat box to pick up the free to air sat channels including BBC HD.

Pros:
No subscription
Hundreds of channels
BBC HD is great

Cons:
C4, five and some others are encoded and won't display (to do with contracts with BSkyB I think)
After a couple of years it has become temperamental and packs up every now and again.
It runs very hot

Having said that - I've heard good things about the Foxsat PVR and that would be my selection, especially if it can do the HD channels.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MSIC

I'd just also mention that i have a Sky box, as well as a Sky+ box, sitting in my attic doing nothing, and my understanding is that i cant do anything with them (stupid Sky).

Is my regular Sky dish likely to work perfectly with the Humax, or are there any pitfalls i need to be aware of?

Thanks, as always, in advance!

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I think if you have an old skybox you can get a freesatfromsky card and get channels that way.

I bought a freesat box, what a total waste of time!!!

The only real advantage is probably the BBC HD channel, but *THATS IT*.

-Very poor selection of channels
-Average picture quality from Standard def channel
-"hundreds" of FreetoAir channels available are an absolute joke, GodTV? GayTV?
-No Five, C4, Dave, Virgin1, Sky 3, TmF etc.

So i returned my freesat box and am sticking with freeview and contemplating VirginMedia...

If you can't get freeview or Virgin, Get Sky, FreeSat is a waste of time.