FREESAT

[icyrose]

Can anyone advise me on what i need to do?
I am looking to purchase a freesat box but i do not know if it will work with the following:
1 I have purches an LCD tv which has freeview already installed.
2 The small block of flats that i live in has recently have, by the housing association, a disgital aerial and a communal satelitte dish.
Would the freesat box work with this combination?

Any reply would be appreciated.

[ChuckFickens]

yes

[rov1200]

With Freesat you need an extra HDMI cable that runs from the dish to your new freesat box. The satellite dish used for SKY can be used to get the freesat signal. You may need a quad LNB on the dish to cope with the extra output. Whether your communal setup will cope with both you will have to check.

[rov1200]

This is the freesat website

http://www.freesat.co.uk/

[ChuckFickens]

Rov is trying to be helpful, but his information in the first answer is totally incorrect.

You do not need HDMI cables running to the Dish, the existing coax cable that is inplace is the correct cable. you also do not have to worry about quad LNBs as you said in your question it's a communal system.

Now there is one issue that you should be aware of, and that is the requirement for any freesat box that has a built in hard drive recorder (i.e. similar to a sky+ box) to have two separate feeds from the dish. so if you have two separate outlets on the wall for the satellite dish then you can get a freesat box with a recorder built in, if you only have one feed from the dish then you can only use a freesat receiver with no built in recorder,

[romko]

that is good advice from chuck.
technomate do some good free to air sat receivers. Avoid sky boxes as these are less flexible (you can't for example re-order the chanels to suit yourself, or alter the audio channels) and you may need a card (even an old one) to get some channels.

[rov1200]

I can only explain about my current setup. We originally had Sky only. We then bought a BBC/ITV freesat box. We then needed an extra cable from the dish to the freesat box so we then had the choice of Sky or Freesat by switching. We could have taken the sky cable and put it into the freesat box but we wanted the choice of both.
Freesat is free to watch but does not supply subscription film channels. Freesat only supplies a subset of Sky channels so you may feel that this is a loss. to what you had before.

As you say you are on a communal setup and there is obviously some differences there.

[romko]

rov1200: what you need is a box with loop thru . this allows you to connect the dish to , say, your freesat box and also then connect that box, via its loop through dish output, to your sky box so both can use the signal. It's a lot easier than multi-out LNBs, 2 runs of cable or whatever

[rov1200]

Romko I'm glad you don't disagree totally. You never know you may wan't two feeds to separate TVs in the house.