Let me start by saying that I think that the Foxsat HDR is a great box and does almost everything I ask of it. I am also looking forward to getting BBC and ITV iplayer.

If all that was not enough there is one other thing that I would like to be able (easily) to do and that is watch / record some non-Freesat channel - Film24 and France24 being a couple of them.

I know that I can tune these in using manual tune and then go through the fairly complex switch to non-Freesat mode and find the Channels I want amongst the many listed. However this seems to cause problems with the recordings I have set up with the Freesat EPG and also I have not found a way to set up to record a programme that will be broadcast in the future (e.g. a film in a couple of days time). I know that I could not do this with the EPG but I do know the channel, and could find the start time and length so would be willing to put these in manually in the same way as on an old VCR (and even my Freeview PVR).

There was some discussion about this here previously, see here, though that thread seemed to go a bit off track.

Is there an 'easy' way to do this or is there any chance that a future upgrade might allow something like this?

You cannot do a timer for non-freesat. Basically the freesat spec says that boxes need to have the capability to receive non-freesat channels, but Humax have done the minimum required on non-freesat. I have a motorised dish, enabling that on the HDR means I lose one of the tuners, so stuff that.

Humax have repeatedly clarified that non-freesat is a minority function and they don't envisage doing anything about it.

Given the number of ex-pats from Europe in the country this seems like a missed opportunity to market the HDR to quite a large minority market.

Call Humax and tell them about it, it can't hurt.

It should have been made possible to add a few "user defined" entries to the "Freesat" mode channels, which related to non-freesat stations.

Then these could be accessed as User1, User2 etc and although would not have the EPG could at least be switched to easily.

I would like to see Sky News or Film 24, don't really care about timed recordings for these.