SATELLITE to watch International (incl. Russian Television Channels)

These pages are intended as a general advise towards people who are new to the world of Television via Satellite. Being  pretty much "dummies" ourselves, we figured out that you get very easily drowning in information when choosing your setup

When we were choosing for Satellite television, our ultimate goal was:

1. receive Russian channels
2. receive broadcasts in digital quality

In our search for the ultimate setup, we faced a lot of questions from what receiver to choose, what dish to take, motorized or not, subscriptions, coding, what satellite, what channels we would be able to receive, etc.etc.etc.

Russian TV Channels
There are about a dozen channels receivable from within central Europe which have Russian as their primary language. This is a mixture between native Russian channels as well as Ukraine channels broadcasting in Russian. You will find a nice mixture from news to music to movies (a lot of old, nostalgic movies) on various satellites.

That's where we'll face our first problem: There were Dutch channels for example are located on the Astra1 satellite, Russian channels can mainly be found on the Hotbird and the Sirius satellites. A few more on close satellites like Thor, but we'll keep these out of here for time being.

Remember, English channels (e.g. BBC1-4) are on the Astra2 satellite, which also requires another LMB, or a rotator setup!

Hotbird & Sirius
A standard setup in Holland is a fixed (non motorized) satellite pointing to the Astra1. A so called LMB will be centralized on the Astra1. The Hotbird is very closely located towards the astra1, so what you can do is install a second LMB on the same -fixed- dish, but slightly point it out of the center.

Benefits from a fixed satellite dish and multiple LNB's is that you can instantly switch from one to another satellite... However, you'll be missing all the fun on the Sirius satellite as for that one the dish needs to relocate away from the astra1 and hotbird position. Therefore you will need a motorized installation: the receiver will activate the motor and turn the dish into position towards the Sirius Satellite. Unnecessary to say, switching between satellites can take a few seconds, depending on the speed of the motor

There are different sizes of satellite dishes, from which 60cm is considered sufficient for receiving the ASTRA1 (Dutch channels). However, if you want to receive channels from the other satellites, we would advise going for 100cm. This will also improve receiving during bad weather on the Dutch Channels.

Costs
To receive the Dutch channels, you will need a receiver with a CanalDigital card, for which you will pay contribution of a few Euro's a month (starting from 3.30 Euro). Without this card, broadcasts will be coded, and not viewable. But hey - the digital picture and sound quality you get is definitely worth a subscription!
Fortunately, within Russia it is not such common practice to scramble broadcasts, which means that most of the channels are for free, and you won't have to worry about expensive and cumbersome  subscriptions!

What else will you get?

There are literally thousands of TV and radio channels to receive from the air, but not all channels are Free to Air, and will require a subscription. Many subscriptions are restricted to particular nations only, and can not be purchased in other countries.

The good news again is that there are plenty of free channels, from movie channels, informational channels to religious channels. For music lovers: there are plenty of music channels up there that broadcast great music!

Receivers
Before going to a shop and buying a satellite receiver, ask yourself a few questions:

• What will be the setup of my system - motorized, or non motorized?, how many dishes will have to be connected?
• Do you need a receiver with a recording option to replace your VCR? (e.g receiver with a build-in hard disk)?
• Do you want an easy to use receiver, or do I want a pc-based receiver. (e.g. dreambox)
• How many broadcasts do you want to view simultaneously? (if you want to watch channel A, and record channel B at the same time, remember you need at least 2 tuners!)

People who are used to the old fashioned cable TV on which they easily can connect multiple TV's and VCR's throughout the house are often disappointed that a satellite setup is limited from that point of view. Keep in mind the following:

• A receiver can usually receive just one channel at the same time (single tuner). That means you can watch your satellite program from just 1 (!) tv, and not mutiple tv's through your house. For each TV you will require a receiver!! There are nowadays multi-tuner receivers, allowing 2 or more channels to be watched at the same time
• Same counts for VCR - if you want your VCR to be connected to the receiver, keep in mind that you are always limited to the number of channels the receiver can show simultaneously. - usually this one, which means you can only record the program you are actually watching!
• If your satellite dish is pointed to the ASTRA position, and you use the motor to rotate it to the Sirius position, remember that no-one in your house will receive the Astra channels anymore, neither will do your VCR.
• Your satellite receiver will be the "zapper" - your TV or VCR will show the picture via the AV channel. This means that programming your old fashioned VCR for multiple channels is not possible - it will only record what the receiver will be tuned on! For those of you that bought a dvd/hdd recorder for cable tv: too bad, this also counts for you guys.
• For each receiver you will need a descrambling card (e.g. canaldigital) and appropriate subscriptions, unless you want to share a single card and plug it from one into another receiver all the time. Remember that the card requires a reader as well (not included in all receivers by default; often to be purchased optional)
• Satellite receivers might need some additional time to swap channels compared to standard cable television. Usually this is about a second.

So if you have multiple rooms, with multiple TV's throughout your house, you will most likely need multiple receivers. A fixed setup might be advisable in this case, or you can choose a mixed setup (1 rotor, 1 fixed). Remember that only one receiver can manage the motor, and therefore "decides" that other connected receivers are pointed at.

New satellite receivers nowadays provide a PVR option: they are dual tuner and have a hard disk onboard to record your favorite programs to disk for watching it later.

Echostar

Echostar's top model at the moment is the PVR5020. It has a 80 (or larger if you require) hard disk on which your programs will be recorded. This receiver is dual tuner; it can be hooked up to 2 LNB's (or digiseq switch), allowing you to record one channel while watching another. Nice on this box is that you are even able to record/watch more then 2 channels in some situations.

The box is running super; no problems. Regularly new firmware releases are available to fix minor issues. The only kind of issue I believe is still not fixed is the USB connection - this thing is tooooo slow. But if you can bring up the patience, it'll work.

Broadcasts are recorded in in .AVR files, and can therefore not be opened on your pc, or burned instantly to DVD. After playing around a bit, I have found a way of converting these files to DIVX or XVID format, which means you can burn it on disk, and play from other systems.

Dreambox

The dreambox 7020 is a satellite receiver running Lunix - don't get the wrong impression here: it's looking like a satellite receiver, but it's actually a pc. If you want to use the power of this open system, it's advised to have a bit of PC knowledge, otherwise I suggest to find another solution.

The dreambox is a single tuner and therefore can only watch or record one channel at the time.

Benefit of the dreambox is fast zapping and boquets (collections of channels) you can easily create, download or even control over an http connection. It plays MP3 and mpeg files as well, and can connect up to your server. For this you need to install particular images, which is basically a graphical linux interface allowing you do unlock all the  power of your dreambox.

Dreambox

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