reception in the north of Spain

[lola]

Hi! I'm Lola. I live in the north-west of Spain (7.1 W - 42 N). I have just had a 1.35m dish intalled to get bbc channels with a viewing card, but now we have heard that bbc is going to astra 2d. Does anyone know if I will be able to watch these channels from 1st June? My husband is English and he misses English tv a lot. I don't want to pay the installer until I find out if I need to ge a bigger dish, but I'm afraid he won't want to wait for another month.
Apart from that we are having problems to get our card activated, up to now we just recieve free to air channels: sky news, QVC, boomerang etc. We got a grunding gds3000 digibox. Can anyone help me?

 

[rolfw]

Hello Lola, an easy way to see if you can receive Astra 2D, the satellite which the BBC will use is to see if you can receive 669 Going Places TV This is not encrypted, so you should be able to see it now.

For how long have you been trying to activate the card?

 

[lola]

Thank you for answering rolfw. I can get 669 Going Places, so do you think I don't need to change the arial? I have to tell my installer this information because he was going a little mad with us. There aren't many English people living in this village and it is the first time he has to do this kind of installation so he is a bit lost. As far as the card is concerned we have been trying to get it activated now for at least one month. First the installer brought us a Tompson digibox we could see just free to air channels so we thought it could be damaged or something like that so we changed it for the grunding digibox, now we are going to try again, my husband's mother is going to phone in England again because we have to change the numbers of the digibox in the card I will tell you maybe today or tomorrow if we carry on having problems like with the tompson or do you think it has nothing to do with the box?

 

[rolfw]

It could be to do with the software version on the box Lola, does the Grundig actually recognise the card, does ti show the card number in the system information panel under system setup? If it doesn't sho a card, then the box may still be on the old software which won't recognise the new card (Had the same problem myself a while ago).

There are a couple of other tests you can perform, Go to http://www.lyngsat.com/dig/skyuk.shtml amd then go into the installers menu, Services/system setup/0,1,select/manual tuning...You can then type in any of the Astra 2D frequencies and test for strong signals and quality on each one.

If your installer gets this one right, he'll probably end up quite busy.

 

[lola]

Rolfw,
I'm afraid my mother-in-law wasn't able to get the card activated is a little difficult when they tell you to press buttons and you don't have tha machine with you! so we will have to wait until 30th May to watch BBC, and then we will have to take the box to England "on holidays" and get it activated there, maybe then we will be able to get ITV when we come back to Spain. This is certainly turning out to be more difficult than we had expected. I told my installer what you told me about 669 Going Places, and he didn't have idea, but he is happy because at last he is going to be paid so he should thank you. I do it as well Rolfw.

 

[rolfw]

Hi Lola, haven't given up yet.

When you go into Services/System Setup/System information, does it show the card as being recognised and if not, what is the software version, the one at the bottom?

 

[lola]

The number of the card appears in viewing card number and the number of the EPG software version is 3.1a.5. Apart from that the message: "please insert old car and retry new card in 5 minutes" appears on the screen every ten seconds. I forgot to tell you that we could see Boomerang (we have a little 2-year-old girl) a couple of weeks ago and now it tells us to insert the card, so it seems as it isn't free-to-air anymore.

 

[sayireand]

Lola I'm in Madrid. Maybe I can help you over the phone. Send me a mail to sayshay@hotmail.com

I was trying to activate a FTV card recently and it took a week and a half and quite a few calls to the call centre. It seems that there are some problems with the Version 2 cards both the FTV cards and the subscription cards. Some people in Ireland have have been missing some of the channels on activation.

The software is fine for the new card so it should recognise it. Certainly software 2.8 doesn't recognise new version cards.

 

[rolfw]

Unfortunately Boomerang went to subscription a week or so ago, so that is why you are getting that message. Your present box has probably been tied to a card previously, which is why it is asking for the old card. The BBC do have the facility to send out a pre activated card, but only in exceptional circumstances, strangely enough, the last time this happened to me was also with a Grundig box and they had to send out the pre-activated card after a couple of weeks of trying to get the other one to work.

 

[lola]

Rolfw, do you think then that the box is second hand or that I can have problems to get my card activated one day because of that old card? thanks for the information about Boomerang, we thought that is was due to the change of digibox, because it happened more or less at the same time.

 

[rolfw]

Its not definitely the case that the box has been married to a card previously, just that the message would appear to indicate it.

The problem is that with the introduction of the new cards, there are a range of new error messages being produced and its not certain what they all mean.

Even if the box has been married previously, it shouldn't prevent the new card being activated, but the message that they send to the box may be different.

It is worth persevering with the attempts by phone, do your inlaws in England have Sky? If they do, it may be worth considering posting the box to England with the card and getting them to connect it to their dish and use the phone connection to activate the card, this is normally instantaneous.

If not, all they should need is a sheet with everything that is written on the System information screen and keep ringing the BBC until they finally give up and send out the pre-activated card. When they give instructions to take out the card and clean it etc, just say yes, doing that or say that they are being called from work so can't access the box.

 

[lola]

I think you are right about sending the digibox to England, we are going to Sheffield in June so we will take it with us. We still have the news of the FTA channels, so patience! Thank you for your help.

 

[micheal]

Hi Lola, I can activate your card for you if you are in the Marbella area. Regards Micheal

 

[lola]

Hello Michael. I'm afraid I live quite far away from you. We are near Oviedo, but thank you very much for your help, you are very kind.