I have Sky and am wondering if its possible to pick up Hot Bird 9.
I read that it reaches Europe and I thought it also reached the UK however when I tried to pick up a channel on the satellite (11747 H, 27.5, 3/4) Sky picks up no signal.
Is there any way to pick up the signal or is that not possible?
You can certainly pick up the Hot Bird satellites in the UK. Would I be correct in assuming you currently have a standard Sky setup that gets the Sky channels? If that is the case, your dish is pointing towards the Astra 2 and Eurobird 1 satellites, not the Hot Bird ones, which is why you can't pick up any channels from Hot Bird.
well the dish needs to be pointed (you can do it in the garden to test if you have a spare dish to try with) at 13e, a small dish will do, it's a satellite with even more powerful signals then the one which Sky uses (28.2e), to receive the huge number of channels from Hotbird, you need a FTA satellite box, otherwise if you want something like BBC World News, you could tune that in via other channels using your sky digibox.
You don't say what you are looking for though, a lot of english channels are scrambled and a lot of free stuff is italian and arabic.
So, is there anyway I would be able to 'point it' to Hotbird 9?
Well it's just as easy as turning your dish round to 13.0 degrees instead of the 28.2 degrees that your 'Sky' dish is pointing at.
However looking at http://www.lyngsat.com/hb9.html I don't know how much you'd receive using a Sky digibox or a Free to air reciever, most (of the TV channels at least) of it is encrypted and wouldn't be receivable with a Sky box
I was looking for Al Arabiya - it's a free to air channel.
Would I need to get a separate dish to point at 13E for Hotbird 9, or could I do it and then still receive the Sky channels like BBC One, ITV, Channel 4, etc?
I was looking for Al Arabiya - it's a free to air channel.
Would I need to get a separate dish to point at 13E for Hotbird 9, or could I do it and then still receive the Sky channels like BBC One, ITV, Channel 4, etc?
The only way you could do both at once without an extra dish is with an offset LNB. This is an extra LNB fitted to your dish which points towards the other satellite.
However I suspect that 13e is too far over to have an offset LNB, and if it was how the 2 LNB's would be wired up into your box I don't know. If it can be then you'd need to go to it through the 'Other channels' menu
If you're desperate to see Al Arabiya then I'd recommend downloading Livestation - http://livestation.com which carries it (along with Al Jazeera, Euronews, Russia Today and France 24 in Arabic) to a fairly decent quality
Last edited by Inspector Sands on 5 September 2009 12:13pm - 2 times in total
[quote:0600210034="Joshua" pid="630068"]I was looking for Al Arabiya - it's a free to air channel.
Would I need to get a separate dish to point at 13E for Hotbird 9, or could I do it and then still receive the Sky channels like BBC One, ITV, Channel 4, etc?[/quote:0600210034]
The only way you could do both at once without an extra dish is with an offset LNB. This is an extra LNB fitted to your dish which points towards the other satellite.
However I suspect that 13e is too far over to have an offset LNB, and if it was how the 2 LNB's would be wired up into your box I don't know. If it can be then you'd need to go to it through the 'Other channels' menu
If you're desperate to see Al Arabiya then I'd recommend downloading Livestation - http://livestation.com which carries it (along with Al Jazeera, Euronews, Russia Today and France 24 in Arabic) to a fairly decent quality
I don't think its possible with a sky box due to lack of Diseq support, a cheap FTA receiver will do the job however, although again not sure if the minidish can cope with 28.2e and 13e