Confused between Freesat and FTA

B

bertj

Member
My Satellite Setup
Humax Foxsat HD
PC WinXP
My Location
Merseyside
Just come across your very impressive site. I'm completely new to the world of satellites and would appreciate a bit of help!
Just bought a Humax Foxsat HD and I've noticed that Channels such as CNN, Bloomberg and Sky News are not available on the automatic setup but are available (as well as about 300 more channels) using the manual tune. I presume that I could set up my favourites from the manual tune list but how do I know which are the 'correct' channels for stations such as BBC 1, ITV, etc. There seems to be a lot of repetition in the manual tune list.
I hope the above makes sense because I suspect I'm missing something obvious.
 
In non-Freesat Mode, all Regions are available to you and there is nothing to stop you saving them and watching them - The "correct" BBC and ITV Regional variants are whatever you want them to be!

Personally I retain all of them, because "you never know"

In Freesat Mode, you get the Region allocated by the BBC and ITV controlled Postcode based lists. This is not always "correct" for everybody.
 
Freesat is a subset of the Free To Air (non scrambled channels).

Channels that occur on the Freesat epg have paid £30k /year for the right to be listed. BBC & ITV are set up so all the regional versions are available. It should be fairly obvious which channel is for which area.
 
Further: (Just had to nip downstairs to check my facts by reference to my own Foxsat!)

In non-Freesat mode you can't pick your own Favourites - only an Auto Favourites list is available to you, decided statistically based upon what Channels you have recently watched.

In Freesat mode, the Favourites Lists are customisable, but have a habit of "disappearing". Presumably this bug will be eliminated during a future software release.

But, in non-Freesat mode, you can rearrange the Channel list as you wish and can delete stuff you will never watch.
 
Thanks very much for your replies; things are a lot clearer to me now. However, if I understand you correctly, there is no way of adding non-freesat channels to an existing favourites list. A possible answer is therefore to select all the channels, in turn, that I am likely to watch and allow an Auto favourite group to set itself up. Presumably I can then re-order these channels.
Thanks again.
 
bertj said:
Thanks very much for your replies; things are a lot clearer to me now. However, if I understand you correctly, there is no way of adding non-freesat channels to an existing favourites list. A possible answer is therefore to select all the channels, in turn, that I am likely to watch and allow an Auto favourite group to set itself up. Presumably I can then re-order these channels.
Thanks again.
Click to expand...

Much, much easier to simply shift the ones you do want to watch to the head of the Channel list, using the Edit functions:

I have SkyNews at 5001 so, as soon as I pop into non-Freesat mode, that is the default Channel.

Just have a good play around and find out what form of organisation suits you best.
 
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