nwill said:
Thanks again for your comments guys. I currently do have Sky Sports from Sky Digital and the picture quality is excellent but unfortunately they do not offer any live English Premier football games that kick off at 3pm on Saturdays here in the UK.
That is why I am considering either Nova or Digitalb. I know that Digitalb is a lot cheaper but I have heard that Nova provides the better picture quality. If I do go for Nova I can then cancel my Sky Subscription as they offer a good overall sports package.
My ideal scenario would be to keep Sky and just purchase a cheap DIgitalb card for just the 3pm sat games but as I've said in my first post in this thread, I have a lot of doubts that the picture quality is any good in wet conditions even with a 80 cm dish.
I am not familiar with Sky UK satellite setup (dish size, receiver model, Sky contract conditions, etc.) so please bear with me if what I am suggesting below is not possible for some unforseen reason.
But since you have already a dish pointing at 19.2E ? then perhaps you can use it to watch hotbird if you change the LNB to one which is good for both satellites.
All you need to do is to ask an installer to change the LNB and to run a cable to the receiver, add a Diseq switch so that you can select the correct satellite.
Check if the receiver can allow you to have a Diseq and if you can scan, add and watch other channels from other satellites.
This way you don't need to spend much on equipments and you need only to buy the cheapest Nova card that you can find.
Is the dish a property of SKY or is it yours ?
Maybe this is not such a good idea if Sky doesn't allow any changes to their equipments, as per their contract.
Also, check if the receiver embedded CAM supports IRDETO encryption.
(check also if Conax can be encrypted for the DigitAL
If all goes well, then all you have to do is to insert the Nova smartcard whenever you want to watch your prefered matches.
Should the Sky smart card be inserted into the box all the time ?
It would help other members to give their opinions about this post if you can give more details about your system
Dish size
Dish position (pointing to which satellite)
Receiver model number and make (attach a pdf manual if you have it or download it from the maker website)