I've been looking round for a new sat reciever for a while now, my old Echostar 808 has been brilliant but with HD here it's looking a bit old. After a lot of dithering I decided on the Fortec, as I have read mainly good things about it. I have a 1m dish which moves by voltage, but used Diseq 1.2 and a V-Box which converts the Diseq signal to votage. Bought the Fortec from Maplins and it was delivered within 2 days, brilliant service from Maplins, anyway, dismantled the Echostar and set the dish to 28east for the Freesat programmes, the instruction book was in German so had to download the English version from the Fortec site, got it all set up and I have to admit, the HD channels looked really good, so far, impressed..
moved the dish manually to 19east and set up all the channels there, saved and decided to go back to 28east before I moved on and stored more sats. Dish wouldn't move, moved it back manually and started again, still wouldn't move, spent best part of 2 days going over and over all the settings, now I'm not green when it comes to satellites, been doing it for 15 or so years but this b****** had me beat! Called the Engish number given for Fortec which is just a recorded message telling you to email them, I've emailed them 4 times now and still aint got a reply, so packed it up, got in touch with Maplins and they collected it last Friday and promised a full refund, turns out there are quite a few out there that have the same problem.
So, if you have one and you use it just for Freesat, great. if you ever decide to go motorised with it, it'll probably be out of guarantee and it will be too late. Just a warning.
Me? I'll wait till the new Echostar HD comes out early next year,
Haga
moved the dish manually to 19east and set up all the channels there, saved and decided to go back to 28east before I moved on and stored more sats. Dish wouldn't move, moved it back manually and started again, still wouldn't move, spent best part of 2 days going over and over all the settings, now I'm not green when it comes to satellites, been doing it for 15 or so years but this b****** had me beat! Called the Engish number given for Fortec which is just a recorded message telling you to email them, I've emailed them 4 times now and still aint got a reply, so packed it up, got in touch with Maplins and they collected it last Friday and promised a full refund, turns out there are quite a few out there that have the same problem.
So, if you have one and you use it just for Freesat, great. if you ever decide to go motorised with it, it'll probably be out of guarantee and it will be too late. Just a warning.
Me? I'll wait till the new Echostar HD comes out early next year,
Haga