Thanks for the info, i will be purchasing 2 of them tomorrow.
i have a few questions tho if anybody can help me?
1. if ive got the 2 boxes connected to the 1 satellite dish, will i be able to watch the footy on a foreign channel and the parents watch some else on sky? ie if im on a different satellite they can only watch whats on that chosen satellite?
2. i was contemplating putting the satellite up with my dad, hes put many up before, how would i know what way to point the dish? (do i need to have a cardshare package before we start aligning? ie if we see an image on screen it means its alligned right or can it be done without a package first?)
3. if i have the satellite up and boxes installed with their images, in this case the image is blackhole (any better out there?), should i just go ahead and do the rest of the installation myself seeing as its nearly done or is it worth paying a guy to come round and finalise it all for me? how much more is there to do after this point? i can install the C lines and stuff so thats not a hassle. i can use computers!
4. to cut costs im going to install the internal hard drives myself, i think 500gb will be fine but what physical size hard drive will fit the receiver? & where can i buy a usb wifi dongle to use with these boxes?
5. what card sharers should i be looking at to get the full sly tv package and all saturday afternoon kick offs? my friend said he uses http://www.digitalsatkey.com/cccam-server.html has anybody heard or used him?
Thats all for now.
I really appreciate all the help guys, its helping me out big time.
thanks again.
1. you won't be able to do this with a motorized system, what you'd need is a fixed dish with a multibracket, i'm not sure exactly what you'd need though but have a look
here and scroll about 3/4 of the way down and look for
Triax 20 degree Multibracket kit optional LNBs and diseqc switch. i think this bracket is designed for a triax dish so you might need to modify it to fit another make
something like this should enable you to get signals from satellites 20 degrees apart which will cover hotbird 13e, astra 1 19.2e & astra 2 28.2e, i'm not sure what size dish you'd need though to pull in a reliable signal from all 3 satellites, you would also need a lnb with 2 outputs for sky so you can run cable to both receivers and a 4-way DiSEqC switch so you can connect the cables from all 3 lnb's to your box
easiest solution is to put a separate sky dish up for your parents box
2. you don't need a card share set up to test if the dish is aligned, if you're gonna set up a motorized dish you need to make sure it's pointing south (buy a decent compass as it's worth it and will save you a lot of messing about) and the elevation is correct for where you live, then it's a matter of going into the satellite settings on the receiver and adding the satellites you want to pick up then do a manual scan on each satellite to find the channels, if you've got everything set up right you'll pick up over 1000 channels on astra 2 (sky) and you'll be able to view all the free channels without a card share
i'm not sure about vu+ duo as i've never used one but the images are enigma 2 based so it should be similar to setting a dreambox up so i should be able to help you out this once you've got everything installed
3. the hardest part is getting the dish aligned, if you've got some basic networking & pc knowledge you should be able to set the box up yourself
4. think you can use 2.5 & 3.5 inch hdd's in the vu+ duo, i'd recommend one that's 5400rpm as they're quieter and produce less heat though there's a lot more room in the vu+ than dreambox 800 so heat might not be an issue for them, wouldn't bother with wifi but go with homeplugs instead if you can't physically hardwire it to your router