advice on buying free sat equipment

[cg010169]

Wife has been twisting my arm abt getting it so been looking into the past few weeks.
I'm going to have my cousin fix the dish as he use to work for sky years ago so knows more about where to put it angle wise compaired to myself.

Been looking on ebay about buying just the Free sat dish and cables etc. Was just wondering if anyone knew that im getting the right stuff. What has thrown me is the talk about the Cables within to do ads on ebay listed below,


http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Mini-Dish-Qua...29783QQcmdZViewItemQQ_trksidZp1742.m153.l1262

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Sky-Freesat-M...hash=item170239471248&_trksid=p3286.m14.l1318

1 ad says it's uses Twin cable same as Sky and the other just says 20m of High Quality Single Cable. Which one would be the best to get, im guessing it would be the Sky 1 but wanna be sure, so I get the best HD picture.

receiver

Been looking about and alot is being said about the Humax foxsat HD, link below

http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/dvdpvr/0,39030417,49296865,00.htm

Seems a fair price on the dixons website plus with the 10% off code from here comes to about £134.
Has anyone else got this box and is it any good, as i've seen others receivers i.e Bush, Grundig and Goodman’s


any advice would be great thanks

 

[telewestTUM]

with freesat and hd over short cable runs then i dont think it really matters as the picture doesnt decrease as such it just means the SNR will be lower but with 28e the signal is so strong it doesnt really matter

if SNR/AGC is too low then the picture will break up or you wont get any picture at all but i cant see that ever being an issue with 28e as the signal in the uk is so strong

 

[pinkhelmets]

In the 1st link its single cable and the 2nd link its the twin cable. The difference is that 1 cable is all that is needed for a single tuner sat receiver, but a twin tuner version (like sky plus) needs 2 feeds ~one for each tuner, so you can record one channel while watching another.

Twin cable will be better if you plan to upgrade one day to the pvr freesat version which is due by the end of the year, but its not important because you can always just run another length of single cable when needed. The main important bit is to have the quad output lnb .

 

[lincsat]

Using the twin core cable is more convenient, using two of the single core cables is much better quality. On a short run you likely won't notice the difference.

 

[cg010169]

thanks alot for your info guys

 

[SuperPP]

I'd get a Zone 1 SKY dish with Quad LNB (as long as your no further north than Lancs/Yorkshire (then get a bigger Zone 2).

Also consider a Fortec Passion HD box (£99 if you monitor Maplin B grade offers), much more flexible (more channels easily added), but without the EPG.
If the EPG is needed, the best Freesat seems to be the Humax.