Honestly, I do do other things with my life than play around with TV systems.

But... No sooner had I found as near to the perfect dvr software as I think exists (Myth-TV), my signal against starts deteriorating. I'm in a valley with nothing like a clear line of sight to any repeater TV aerial, so my signal bounces up the valley a few times and is very weak and echoey when it gets here. With the set top box also struggling to maintain signal and no analogue signal, I started to get more and more frustrated with freeview. (DVB-T)

The final nail in the coffin for freeview on my big telly came last Saturday - Rugby Six Nations' finals. First game - perfect. Third game of the same day, the STB was dropping out every minute for a second or two. I got as frustrated with the signal as I did with the blind referee giving France six points!

So - alternatives. Sky - the UK's biggest (only) commercial satellite provider. Their website was confusing, wanting to upsell you broadband and telephone. Neither of which we want to change and it was very hard to find a package without those, or even clear guidance on what to do if you didn't want to change broadband provider.

Then a neuron fired and something from my hindbrain suggested Freesat. This has undergone a big revolution in the past year and now offers nearly all the Freeview channels and more.

About 3 years ago, I dallied with satellite. I put up a 80cm dish and played around with a DVB-S card in my main PC. It worked okay but back then there was almost NO free English-speaking channels. Plenty of German and Dutch, Spanish and French, but the only English channels were God-bothering ones and those trying to sell you other things. No compelling. So I took down the dish and stowed the card. Anyway, I knew I had half the equipment and could get a good signal to Astra-B.

Wife wanted TV she could pause and record, so we needed a "proper" PVR. Googling around led us to Humax and I handed over £250 to Dabs for the top of the line model. I'd bought a cheap "Wharfedale" freeview PVR before, but was very disappointed with the hdd noise and stuttering and wanted to avoid cheap brands this time. That arrived through the week, along with a new bracket and ends, so on my first day off, time for fiddling!

Wife was away for the morning, but I'd warned her I'd need her to help me align the dish in the afternoon.

Up in the loft. Poke some coax through the roof.
Four 14mm holes, some expanding bolts and a few minutes later, one well anchored mast support.
Aluminium tube in place, clamped tight.

Cup of tea while eyeing the darkening clouds suspiciously, then decided to chance it.

Up onto the flat roof where the pole was now sticking proud.
Bolted the dish onto the pole.
Used the pretty satellite maps from http://fr.dishpointer.com to show which direction to point the dish. (Incidentally, the magnetic offset was a good 5' off from the line from here).
Since I'd used this satellite before, I left the elevation adjustment as it was, which was just peeking over the horizon.
Grabbed the coax from the roof, stripped off a bit and screwed in a connector. Screwed /that/ into the LNB and wrapped some self-amalgamising tape around it.

Down into the house, up into the loft. Stuff the other end of the coax into the room below.
Downstairs, stick another end onto the coax.

Plug in the STB itself. Typical setup, and since I had a network hub nearby, I plugged a patch lead into the back of the Humax too. The documentation was very sparse and didn't tell me what this was going to do, but I figured I'd try it anyway... Aerial lead in. Telly on, turn on box and sit back.

Pretty startup screen, then Humax went into first-run mode. Looked for a dish, found it after a few seconds. Detected type of dish - within a minute it was happy. Then checked for updates. This is where the network connection obviously comes in, and it asked me to update. I clicked yes and it took a good long time, perhaps 40-45 minutes. (With a worrying 15 minute delay stuck at 99%, I guess the image was compressed and it was uncompressing and installing - but very little user info given).

After another cup of tea, it had restarted and was back at first-run page. Again, it detected dish and type, then asked me for my postcode. Then came the tuning page. I clicked ok and... channels started appearing!

It found about 130 radio and TV channels. Because I'd entered my postcode, it had automatically chosen the local BBC 1 channel and ordered them all sensibly.

The picture came up - perfect! Sound - perfect!

To be honest, I was a little shocked. Aligning dishes is not always simple especially without a meter (I had ordered one, but was sent a DVB-T meter instead) but some good preparation, an oversized dish (80 when 40cm dishes will work too) and a good dose of luck meant it "just worked".

Whether it continues to work well in strong wind remains to be seen, but for now I'm dead impressed with the service. Freesat offers all I wanted at great quality for nothing!

A word on the Humax - it's very quiet, the interface is good. Only niggle so far is the EPG is a little slow and jerky and sometimes the pause live tv seems to ignore me for a while. Otherwise, just dandy!