Sat TV card switch

I changed the Matrix revolutions card to an X-dream (X-cam?) and I can view more channels and it stops locking up.
On one of the forums I mentioned before I saw the MR cam with version 2.25 locked up if you zap or let it on too long. Not really comfortable.

Later on I will repoint the dish as I have a double LNB (the heads on the dish which receive the signal) and it should be able to receive Astra and Hotbird simultaneously, if you point it correctly.
That is, main LNB head (the one in the middle in the dish) to Hotbird (13 degrees from the east towards the south) and the other one (on the left hand side if you're looking into your dish) should automatically point to the 19.2 degrees SE for Astra.

I'll try it.

Television from satelite, easy

Since I remember I wanted to have a satelite dish and receiver to watch television.
I always postponed it because I thought it was difficult to setup and there were all kind of problems I would run in to.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a promotion and bought myself a Powersky 8210 CISK Pack with a Worldsat dish of around 90 cm.
It was the standard hardware supermarket promotion for 140 bucks.
It has 2 pcmcia slots and one creditcard type slot (that's what I still call them).

I started assembling the thing and noticed there wasn't a coax cable.
Got some cable and connectors (not standard coax cable but specialized for these things).
Also need a thing to attach it to a wall so got one of those too.

Drilled the wholes in the wall, attached the dish, ran the cable attached it to the receiver, hooked up the receiver to the TV and started playing.

First of all went through the menus, there was an option to select a satelite (Hotbird, Astra, ...) and picked Astra.
Then I went to the Signal level menu item and saw that Strength and Quality were both at 0%.
Climbed out of my window again and started moving the dish around until I heard beeps!! Yey!
Got back to the receiver and saw Strength 99% Quality 80%, good enough :)

Menu, channel search, FTA (Free to Air) or ALL, I checked All.
1200 channels!
Half of them working because the other ones are encrypted and not FTA.

Lots of weird channels and a bit amateuristic but some news channels like BBC and CNN and stuff.

Now I changed it to point at Hotbird and got myself a Matrix
Revolutions cam (that's what they are called) card.
Now I get a lot of the non-FTA channels too.
The Matrix Revolutions cam costs around 60 bucks, and I'm thinking of changing it to the X-cam so it won't lockup the receiver too much whenever I'm zapping or watching the encrypted channels too much.

I found some forums about these things but they are not really targetting newbies like me too much.
Here are two links :
http://www.alsat.co.uk/index.phphttp://www.la-cafetera.com/foro/

But like I said, there is no FAQ about how to grasp all this stuff.
So if someone knows, drop me a line.

Testing the new system

I'm testing out this blogging thing, you can even post stuff via mail.

First Post

Hello,

This is my first blog post.
I don't want to start of lame, but on the other hand I don't want to care wether things are lame or not.
That's it.
Let's become part of the blogger generation.