advice please.

[lexusalan]

hello again. i am moving into a new house soon and i have found out that this house already has a satellite dish on it. the dish is static and points the way of all the sky dishes in the street (as you can tell im an amatuer in the field of satellites, lol) i think that the dish is a 60-65cm one but the problem is i dont know if it is digital or analogue, please can anybody tell me how i can tell the difference? (the dish has still got a LNB on it).
the next thing that i need help with is the receiver, as there is not one in the house i will be looking to buy one, now i only want to really have a mess around and see what can be achieved as i just want to try things, ie networking and things. please could somebody please point me in the right direction of a receiver that is easy to use, easy to connect to the pc but also one which is not out of date and is a good all round receiver.
the reason i ask all this is because of going out and spending 500 quid on a whole new motorised system i might aswell use the dish that i have (which can be upgraded to a better one in time) and buy a receiver to get the hang of the workings of a satellite system.
oh and i have been told that the technomate 1500ci+ is a good receiver, what does everyone else think?

please can anybody recommend and answer my questions and thankyou all very much in advance. lexus.

 

[BGonaSTICK]

If the dish is pointing at 28.2E (the S*y digital satellites) then it is almost certainly digital capable. There is not a lot of free to air on that sat (mainly BBC), so you might be better off pointing it at 19.2E or 13E if you just want to play.

The Technomate is a good basic receiver, which can be expanded later by using cams and cards if you so wish.

Your existing small dish will not pull in all of the channels on these other sats, but will get plenty to play with.

STICK

 

[lexusalan]

thanks very much indeed, sounds to me that this is a good idea to get the basics and then i can move on from there. thanks again.

 

[mike1]

the FTA 19.2e lineup can be found here or either the 13e lineup herecheck out these sites too:
http://www.digitalsat.co.uk
http://www.analoguesat.co.uk