Totally Confused

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Charlee

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Hi, I am an american living in France. I just purchased a cheap analog satellite receiver (GF Star 1100) in order to hopefully get some english speaking channels. The user manual that came with the equipment, if you can call it that, would take a guru to understand so I began to play with the thing to see what channels I could receive. It, if I'm saying this correctly, is programmed to Astra 19 East, L0=UNI. What I am receiving are German channels, and English news channels. It seems I am supposed to receive many more than I am. I can hear the english speaking channels but don't get a picture no matter if it's set to horizontal or vertical. As I don't speak French or German it is quite a letdown. The German channels show some great movies if only I could understand them. For me to receive any help from anyone I know there is more information needed, but I don't understand enough at the moment to give it. Would anyone be interested in helping me. I have read the faqs, and quite a few of the post before posting but not understanding the technical language does get in the way of things.

If anyone would like to help a beginner please feel free to email me at: Dianne@free.fr

Thanks in advance
 

w hole

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Hello Charlee

I'm afraid you are not going to get much else by way of English Language services with the set up you have.

The 'sound only' services you are getting are the BSkyB Analougue signals which have the pictures encoded as it is a Pay Only Service. [It will be closing down soon anyway - about half of the channels on BSkyB Analogue will close at the end of this month, and the rest within the next 2 or 3 months.]

Even NPR which you might have found will be closing at the end of March, as they have now started testing their digital service on Hotbird which is at E13.

There is a webite which specializes in Analogue Reception, I will try to find it and post the URL for you.

Kind regards

W Hole
 
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Charlee

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Thanks so much for your kind response. Another question, if I may? At the moment I am not connected using the dish or head that I bought. My landlord hooked me up to the dish he already had on the roof of the building I live in. Will this make a difference in my reception etc.?

Thanks again...:-)

Charlee
 

2old4this

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It depends on how he hooked you up.
If he used poor cable, or the cable is too long, etc then you will in any case suffer signal loss before it gets to your receiver.
If he has hooked up multiple parties then the consequences for you depend on how he has achieved that. The fact is you will each need to be able to independently select the different frequency-bands and polarisations offered by the LNB (the "head" you referred to, I think). Otherwise you get a problem when the parties all want to watch different things. Imagine you need to watch a channel that happens to be vertically polarised, but your neighbour a channel that happens to be horizontally polarised. A normal LNB can only be in one state at once - so one of you will not get a picture.
The solutions to this vary. One is to have an LNB which offers multiple independent outlets, one per attached tuner. Another approach is to use an LNB with independent outlets for vertical & horizontal & low-band & high-band, all fed into a switch box which accepts multiple inputs from the various tuners and directs them accordingly.
In any event, if your landlord isn't knowledgable in this area and has simply tapped into an existing feed from a normal LNB then you will have problems.

2old
 
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Charlee

Guest
Thanks for all the great information! I'm too old for all of this also. :-)

Charlee
 
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