Satellite TV Question(s)

John am Rhein · December 6, 2007

My new apartment has a TV outlet that's supposedly connected to a satellite dish on the roof. I don't (yet) have a German satellite receiver box to pick anything up from this. What I do have is a UK Sky Digital box with an expired viewing card in it.

Now obviously I can't receive Sky through this - not only is the Sky subscription cancelled, but I'm pretty sure that Sky is actually broadcast from a different satellite than the one the dish is pointing to.

However, should I be able to receive something, i.e. German free channels? I've been to sites like this one: http://www.satmania.com/eng/ that give details of how to add channels to Sky boxes - I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that it's channels for the Astra 19.2E satellite I should be trying - but although it seems to find these channels few of them show anything at all and the ones that do tend to be very intermittent, giving me a blank screen and no sound most of the time. This suggests to me that I'm perhaps getting a very weak signal, maybe because the dish isn't aligned properly (?)

Questions, if anyone knows much about this, are:

1) is what I'm trying to do actually possible, i.e. using a Sky box to pick up non-Sky channels after the subscription has been cancelled?

2) is there any other way I can test the signal strength to verify that there is actually something to receive down the wire - short of actually buying or borrowing a German satellite box, of course. I'm reluctant to buy one until I know it's actually going to work.

Hassony · December 6, 2007

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