On 2008-06-10 10:54:16 +0100, "Dave Liquorice"
said:

On Mon, 9 Jun 2008 23:43:32 +0100, Alan wrote:

Other boxes in the market can receive other free to air channels but
they will not show the Freesat EPG.

How easy are ordinary off the shelf DSAT boxes to use? Do they have some
form of EPG or do you have to know that channel 654 is BBC1, 732 is BBC2,
263 is Ch4 etc?


Pretty easy.

I have an Echostar one which I've had for three or four years. This
has an EPG which is built using information from the channel
transmissions. As a minimum, there is the channel name, others have
entries for the current and following programs while most have a more
detailed program listing. The information is not as rich as Sky's EPG
in that there are not the detailed info capabilities and so on.
However, it's perfectly possible to make grouped and sorted lists of
channels by name, for example.

This particular receiver has a built in 36V dc positioner with 3-5A
output for a motorised dish. With this, I can simply select the
channel that I want and the dish moves appropriately to the correct
satellite. I can sub group the channels by satellite if I want to do
that, so that for example I have all of the Astra 2 channels together,
Astra 1, Hotbird, Thor and so on.

Newer receivers tend to have DiSEqC signaling for control of satellite
motor positioners because the power supplies can be made smaller.
There are now motor positioners that can be operated by the DiSEqC
signal via a coax, but they currently all seem to be the lightweight
ones. For a larger dish or an exposed position, a heavy duty motor
is a good idea (e.g. the Jaeger 1224 which is pretty much an industry
standard). These are 36v only and need a small positioner control box
to convert the DiSEqC signals. Apparently, this can all be automated
though.