Best Satellite Dish for France
We are travelling to France in June, (Loire Valley Area) can anyone recommend a portable satellite dish to take
Thanks
Comments
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Are you meaning size of dish or a specific make? If it's size then you might get away with a 65cm dish although if it is your intention to visit France on a regular basis and perhaps go a bit further south an 85cm dish would be best as you should be able to get all UK terrestrial channels like BBC 1 etc, almost, if not including, the Med coast.
David
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We have a roof mounted one but if we were to go back to a caravan then the one we would consider buying is.
QuickSAT however there are other makes that are worth consideration.
I guess it depends on how much you want to spend, prior to our roof mounted one we had a simple 85cm dish on a tripod and a freesat tuner total cost about £65.
How good are you at finding the satellite? it can take sometime if you are new to it, which is what puts a lot of folk off. I'm lucky in that my OH is quiet patient and happy to 'play' with the setup, however his patience did give up at just over 4 hours
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Budget: Buy an Aluminum tripod with a removable top section. Buy any 80cm dish with a foldable arm. I would also suggest getting a decent sat finder, a digital one with the sat positions programmed to make setting it up very easy. Also, and critical, buy 20m of good cable, the cable is as important as the dish, look for WF100 cable. Buy an LNB and away you go. Should be about £100 all in on Ebay or similar.
Med range. The quicksat stuff has a decent reputation, their all in kit is currently about £300.
Lux: Snipe products. £600 to £700 but fully automatic, no setup,
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Hi
Thanks for your replies, I should have clarified that we have a large satallite dish already but was looking to purchase a smaller one for more portability to take to France. When we were in Northern France (20miles from Calais) someone recommended a Multimo by Zehnda Dish and a SATlink WS-6906 Satellite finder is this a good system? or can someone recommend a product - make and model please ( a digital one with the sat positions programmed to make setting it up easy).
Thanks
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"Best" is too challenging a term to get into.
We have a Triax 64 cm dish and under the "new" satellite footprint we were using it as far down as Martel in the Lot. Under most conditions the gain was fine, but in a heavy thunderstorm we got short drop out periods. Not worth lugging a bigger dish just to cope with that minor issue IMO.
Re a "finder". My experience is that the "Easy Find" (TM) decoder built into our Avtex, coupled with buying the associated "traffic light" LNB has effectively sorted the issue of determining the right satellite.
This in use with a rudimentary "finder" that screams at any satellite makes a powerful and effective combination. The screaming finder is excellent locating a beam and a glance at the traffic lights on the LNB instantly advises if that screaming is about the right cluster or not. I was going to buy a poncy discriminating finder till I thought, I already had that feature if I simply change the LNB.
My routine is now use that Avtex feature to set the dish, then if on an EHU change over the decoder to my much preferred Humax Freesat (TM) unit.
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I like my TV so carry a large 1.25 dish which fits under the bed. I also take a .54 dish for the journey, I have a Sky box and have found that the small dish will work from the French/Spanish border in the south to French/Austrian border in the east but I lose the narrow beam around Lyon and Strasbourg and then I have to get out the big dish, but I don’t, so just stick with Sky.
One realy good peace of kit is an App called Satfinder Lite. It is free and showes you exactly where the sat is. So if you park under trees you can move round your pitch until you get a clear line of sight to the satellite, put your tripod at that point. More than once I have got a signal without having to adjust the dish!!!
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'smaller and more portable for France' doesn't help as the further south you go, the weaker the UKSpot Beam Is...
as said above.....50+ cm dish isn't going to get you the UK home channels very far into France, whereas an 80 cm dish will pick up the Beeb at the French/Spanish border...
if you want reliable signal in France, take your larger dish, or be prepared to run out of puff early on....
im afraid bigger is better with regard to pulling in the UK spot beam.
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Is that recently and do you receive the likes of BBC1,BBC2,ITV,Channel4?
David
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..yes, I thought that would be close to the limit of an 95cm dish..
.although the alignment (skew angle) of the LNB can become critical at the fringes of the footprint, so perhaps Brian had this spot on...
there is quite a difference between the setting for (say) SE France and the Costa Brava, hence the auto skew function as mentioned by TG upthread is a very useful (but comparatively recent) option for continental travellers.
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..sorry....meant to type "66 cm dish".. whoops!
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