I normally just use the two Freeview (DVB-T) tuners for day-to-day use of Media Center and leave the satellite channels (DVB-S) at the bottom of the guide only to venture down there once in a while for random satellite viewing. But take this example below where I’ve tried to record three programs on Freeview; both DVB-T tuners are in use recording several programs during the hour that Supernatural is on but Media Center tells me in small print at the bottom that the conflicting program, Supernatural on channel 6, will be recorded on 118 (satellite channel number) instead.

This feature didn’t immediately make itself known as the conflicting program doesn’t appear as a recorded item in the above list (and obviously only works on channels that appear on both DVB-T and DVB-S), however returning to the guide and jumping down to channel 118 shows it as scheduled to record. It was only after seeing programs that I thought I couldn’t record appear in the RecordedTV list that I realised what it was doing. Nice touch.

I bought the Hauppauge Nova-S2 card and simply installed that in my PC, then I looked online at various satellites but ended up getting a Zone2 spec Sky dish from Maplin. What’s a Zone2 Sky dish? Well a Zone1 is 45cm across and is what Sky install if you’re in the south of England due to the signal strength being good. Zone2 is larger at 60cm and is fitted if you’re in the north of England or Scotland. However the 45cm Zone1 dish can suffer in bad weather due to its small size, so I went for a Zone2 and got the one that looks like a Sky dish so it didn’t look out of place on the side of the house. This is where satellite dishes are a great improvement over aerials; they don’t need to be 10ft above the house to work, just a clear line-of-sight to the sky and that’s all.

Knowing that I’d eventually need more than 1 tuner, I also bought a quad output LNB off ebay for about £20, then fitted that to the dish and ran the 4 cables up the wall and into the attic right where the PC lives. N.B. With a standard aerial you can boost and split the signal, whereas with a satellite dish, you need to take each feed back to the LNB.

Now for tuning I tried a cheap satellite finder from ebay but it was useless:

it registers satellite signals but of course with so many satellites up there you never know exactly what signal you’re registering.

So not having a proper tuner, I settled for the next best thing; Hauppauge’s WinTV software that came bundled with the card. I set it up for a scan of the Astra 2d sat, went up the ladder and pointed the dish in roughly the same direction as my neighbours, then got the wife to shout when the perfect signal was found. It amazed me how accurate the dish has to be, just a few mm left or right and the signal strength drops by almost half; even tightening the bolts in place created enough movement for signal loss. But when you consider the satellite is about 20,000 miles away, those few mm make a massive difference!

I currently use DVBviewer for receiving the HD channels, but the Windows7 beta I recently tested had DVB-S and FTA HD channels out of the box and by using the satellite signal, I no longer have the problems created from living in a fringe DVB-T area and getting mixed signals from two transmitters. So once Windows7 is released this summer, it will be a massive improvement to the system and I doubt I’ll ever use the TV aerial again.