BBC World News from New Broadcasting House

Where I lived previously I had my own dish pointing at 19.2E. I would say becasue the channels are not encrypted and are Free to Air, then no I wouldn't say its illegal.

19.2 was the original position used for Sky's analogue services to the UK and is pretty much as easy to receive in the UK as 28.2. Sky switched to 28.2 in Nov 1998 when they introduced Sky Digital, and eventually closed their analogue broadcasts at 19.2. You may need a slightly larger dish in some situations - but not a huge one.

Lots of us watch services at 19.2 and other slots in the UK. (With a 90cm Toroidal or 1m motorised dish you can get broadcasts from a lot of orbital positions)

You need to pay a TV Licence to watch Live TV broadcasts in the UK - not specifically to watch UK broadcasts, and not specifically to watch the BBC, or indeed UK broadcasts in general. It's certainly not illegal to watch BBC World News particularly in light of the EU's "TV Without Borders".

I've had an extra dish and have been watching BBC World since 2002 without any problems. I have an 80cm dish with a dual monoblock LNB which receives free to air stations from both Astra 19.2E and Hotbird 13E. I always used to watch BBC World on Hotbird because the signal strength and quality was better than Astra but now that the HD version has launched on Astra, I'm watching that version nowadays.

You can point the dish where you like, there are quite a few satellites you can aim for in the UK if you have a big enough dish and are fortunate enough to have a clear line of sight for the dish to see them. But if you're going to do this on a regular basis and you don't want to climb on the roof every five minutes, a motorised dish will be useful.

Of course you won't see any satellites that are below the horizon from the point of view of your LNB no matter how big the dish is.

Yep - motorised or toroidal definitely a good solution for seeing a lot of non-UK channels.

Decent Toroidal will cover 30-40 degrees with very good signal strength and work a lot better than multi-LNB arms.

Advantage of toroidal is you can see multiple satellites simultaneously (so record 28.2 whilst watching 19.2 for instance) - downside is that you need a lot more LNB switching.

Thanks. I was just wondering just that.

Sometimes I wish that there were plenty of FTA channels here in the US like you have in the UK. I think the major networks (NBC, CBS and ABC) are unencrypted on C-Band as a backup feed if their main satellite signal goes down. But who wants to deal with a large satellite dish when you can only get a few channels. I assume channels in North America are encrypted so you will be dependent on your cable or satellite company. Plus channels would rather make more money from both retransmission and advertising fees.

To be fair, the UK and Germany are relatively unusual in Europe in having the main terrestrial channels unencrypted on satellite.

Many other countries - France, Italy, Sweden etc. - have satellite broadcast of terrestrial channels free-to-view encrypted (but without a subscription) that require a viewing card (possibly with a deposit or one-off card charge) but no continuing payments. Others only have the main terrestrial channels available as part of a pay-TV platform.

There are a number of dominant pay-TV satellite operations - as in the US - though unlike the US it is often possible to chose what satellite receiver you want and use that with your platform operator's conditional access module. (Though not with Sky in the UK)

What's annoying is having the UK channels at a different place in the sky as most of the European ones. It means you can go on holiday in continental Europe and get all manner of Spanish, Italian and especially German channels on your hotel TV but the only one you'll get from the UK usually is BBC World News.

I was watching BBC One, Two and ITV in southern europe, no BBC world news strangely, the hotel just needs a bigger dish

Domestic BBC channels are on different satellites to BBC World News (As I think you know).

There are two satellites carrying domestic channels - one FTA with a tight beam (Astra 28.2) and one encrypted with a much wider beam (and used as a backup to fibre feeds to the UK terrestrial transmitter network)

Yes. But far less annoying than having a much smaller range of channels domestically. The reason the UK moved away from 19.2 to 28.2 was lack of capacity. If we had stayed at 19.2 Sky would have been competing with the rest of Europe for capacity.

The real reason you don't BBC get domestic channels on hotel TVs internationally these days is that they are now on tight-beams at 28.2 and much trickier to receive in Southern Europe than they once were, requiring a much larger dish (or dubious reception of the alternative BBC feeds to transmitters). Most hotels will usually have a dish on Astra 19.2 and another pointing at Hotbird I think, and could quite easily handle a Freesat dish too.

The hotel here is showing BBC One West so it must be using a big dish rather then the backups, that definitely doesn't carry the regions iirc