Installing French satellite tv in the Uk

Free French channels finishing from Eutelsat

Oh Dear, more bad news!

for all those with FTA ( free to air) receivers, your favourite channels France 2, 3 and 4 are  to finish in mid November this year.

The announcement came at the end of October, bringing to an end the free reception of these channels going back to the analogue transmissions pre 2011 and to TPS back in 2002 .  The channels will go between 16th and 22nd  of November 2016.

So, if you currently rely on these Free channels from Eutelsat 5w ( formerly known as Atlantic Bird 3 ) what can you do?

Channels affected: France 2, France 3, France 4, France ô and LCP

The solution if you just require French channels, would be to purchase a Fransat HD receiver.

OR

If you require multi language reception, for example Italian, Spanish, German …. as well as the French channels, it will certainly be more difficult, as the current cam units are NOT suitable for STB  ( set top box ) type receivers, but will work in some recent tv receivers. Due to piracy the encryption  has been upgraded, due to rights issues the encryption now includes cam functions, most importantly recordings. The result is, they have made it as hard as possible to use anything but an original Fransat box.

To a degree, the Fransat receivers can be used to tune in other satellites, but organising the resulting channels is very limited. Some STBs from Fransat are better than others and I’ll be  testing out the various models and reporting here as time goes on. The Humax for example is looking like the best so far.

One point to watch is firmware/software updates. Like Skyboxes, updates completely wipe out any customisation you have made to your Fransat box, so its important to make a note exactly how you retune , to gain back your Italian or Spanish etc. after the update has been completed.  This generally will come down to noting which port on your dish switch ( diseqc switch) is connected to which LNB. Once that has been set up, tuning ” recherche globale” is fairly easy.  Use the favourite selection system to store the non french channels.

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