I have an unopened, boxed DMR-EX75, which I bought before I got Virgin Media cable TV and the V+ box.

Can I use the Hard Drive of the Panasonic to either;

- record programmes from Virgin Media via the V+ box or one of the ordinary V boxes I have, or

- record programmes stored on the V+ box (i.e. archive V+recordings onto the Panasonic Hard Drive)?

If not I suppose I'd be better off selling the Panasonic and get one without a Hard Drive.

Where would be the best place to sell it? I thought about ebay, but to be honest I don't trust PayPal.

You can do either or both.
I take it you do not have access to normal terrestrial digital freeview?

Unfortunately not.

Even though Exeter is one of the earlier cities scheduled for the Digital switchover, bizarrely a large part of the city is unable to receive Digital Terrestrial due to the fact that one of the main transmitters hasn't been upgraded.

I've heard for two different TV engineers that there's no scheduled upgrade and that they think it might not happen at all.

The whole point of DSO is that that replace the analogue transmitter with digital ones - for the vast majority of transmitters this will take place over four weeks or so at the DSO date.

If the transmitter isn't going to be converted (which would be very rare) then it's because it won't be required. Your's looks to be one of the earliest areas to be converted (June/July 2009).

According to the latest schedules... assuming you are referring to the Exeter St Thomas transmitter, it currently has no digital multiplexes.

However the first of the three Public service Broadcasting muxes will commence on the 1st of May 2009, with all three being switched on by 30 May 2009, at which point all the analogue channels will switch off.

Your new channels will be :

Channel 41 - Mux PSB 2
Channel 44 - Mux PSB 1
Channel 47 - Mux PSB 3