Just an ongoing query with me really as my neighbour moaned about low dense cloud affecting his sky reception, I was wondering about Freesat. I currently have a Humax 9200 PVR with Freeview and am considering whether to go with Virgin (V+ box cable) or with the freebie services via the new Humax Foxsat box and Freesat. I've never had satellite so would be interested to hear about general quality of reception. Also, is anybody else still using their 9200 box alongside their Freesat setup?

You've already asked this question here. You are likely to get the same answers. But, just to reassure you, I get perfect reception at all times with a Zone 2 (60cm) dish in the north of Donegal where we have frequent severe weather. There is no reason why this should not be the case for anyone in UK or Ireland if their dish has been properly installed (no obstructions, well secured, correctly aligned, decent cabling).

By the way, although there are many good reasons for getting rid of Sky, low cloud is not one of them. If your neighbour really wanted Sky, they should have got their dish sorted out. On the other hand, they've probably had a lucky escape .

I have a 9200 (and a toppy 9800) and the foxsat-hdr. The foxsat is fed from a home installed el cheapo 60cm dish, midlands location (courtesy of e-bay). I chose a 60cm dish over the minidish as the smaller dish needs a wall roughly facing the satellite which would be on the front of my property. The larger dish can be mounted so that it's facing nearly 90 degrees to the wall. As a result it's mounted at the rear of the side wall of my house at only about 6ft high and is virtually invisible.
Reception from the dish (giving 100% signal and quality on most transponders) has so far proved to be totally unnafected by bad weather (even in torrential rain). Freeview on the other hand at the moment is much less robust. I lost a mux during the recent high pressure conditions (like many others) and the dustbin wagon plays havoc with freeview but does not affect satellite at all.

On the other hand the SD picture from my 2 freeview pvrs is so much better than freesat that I only use the foxsat for HD recording/viewing.

I live in the foothills of the western Pennines, where bucketing rain and nigh-on gale force winds are commonplace. We have two high moors either side of us, blocking the whole town's Freeview reception and frequently giving us our own little microcosm of absolutely terrible weather. Our local terrestrial transmitter appears to be made of cardboard and frequently goes down for *days* at a time.

I've never had any problem with satellite reception, even with just a minidish. Satellite take-up in our town is somewhere around 60-70% as a result of the terrible terrestrial signal, and I've never heard anyone else mention problems either.

So... I'm no expert, but I sincerely doubt your neighbour's problems were due to heavy clouds!

Excellent here, recommend going over-spec on the dish if you can, I have 60cm in Oxford area.

I too live on the edge of the peak district in a poor to no Freeview reception area.

I get 100% normally on my dish (both quality and strength) across all channels and the lowest I've ever seen on an individual channel has been a drop to around 75-80% (still in the green area) on quality although still 100% strength.

I did put up an 85cm dish though (transparent) and Titanium 0.2db LNB.

Even in snow and heavy rain, I've had no problems with signal loss.

I too recommend going over spec as it also opens up other possibilities for the future as well as more or less guaranteeing your reception.

Only thing to remember (when buying a bracket) is that a larger dish needs a larger stand off.

I used to get picture break-ups in Peterborough in bad weather, but was very certain it was water ingress into the dish-end of the cable. I have no such issues some 40 miles north with a newly installed dish.

Had Sky for donkey years and have always had good signal, around 80-90% signal on both inputs.

Never loose signal in Heavy Rain, in extream rain storms I occasionaly get pixelation on Chart Show TV channels but the other channels (BBC, Channel 4, Virgin1 etc etc) are fine.

I get better Sky signal than Freeview, I'm in the NE.

I also changed from 60 to 80 cm dish because very heavy rain lost the signal. However I am a bit South of the others, at 80 miles North of the Pyrenees.
If there are problems with a 60 cm dish in England then check connections, cable, LNB & trees shading the bottom of the signal.
This would make it worse in Winter because of leaves, & worse in rain because it sticks to the trees!
Did you put self amalgamating tape in the outside F-connectors.
Remember its the same satellite signal to Freesat & Sky, but STBs differ in sensitivity.
I have a Pace Sky+ & a Foxsat HDR, & IF I believe the built in signal strength & quality meters the HDR is 10% more sensitive. I'll get a better idea when I next go caravanning.
For that I take a 110 cm dish with a 0.3 dB quad LNB, & by using a professional Lacuna meter I get good pictures in most of Spain & Portugal.

I've been in the same place for 20 years (near Paris) with an 80cm dish and I've actually seen an improvement over the years in resistance to bad weather problems. It's because I've changed the LNB:
1989 - single LNB - I used to lose the signal frequently during heavy rain
1995 - changed to twin LNB - still the same problem, but less frequent
summer 2008 - changed to a quad LNB - no loss of picture to date, and we've had plenty of heavy rain.
These LNB's have certainly improved over the years.

LNBs have undoubtably improved over the years, but so have satellites! In 1989 and 1995 you would have been receiving an analogue service. I remember the sparklies well - very usefull for aligning the dish without any instrumentation. IIRC, if that was the Astra 1 constellation (which was not originally intended for DTH), the ERP would have been lower than today's DTH satellites.

Yes, of course, it's been so long I forgot it used to be all sparkly and analogue. (Now it's digital and all blocky). But more recently (last summer) I changed nothing except the LNB to feed my old Sky Box (I even used the old cable) and I no longer get the heavy rain break-up. Could it be because the "angle of dangle" is not the same when I replaced it? - I can't remember how skewed I used to have it from the vertical and the direction of the skew. At the moment I have it slightly clockwise skewed when looking from behind the lnb towards the dish.

Like Nick, I am in France (towards the west in Nantes).

I had a Foxsat HD (still have it) and replaced it with the Foxsat HDR.

I have a Technisat Multitynne 45 cm dish (massive LNB though!), which captures Hotbird 13, Astra 19, Astra 23.5 and Astra 28.x.

Even though this dish is only 45 cm, the reception is great. I haven't perfectly aligned it, and will need to raise it due to some branches, but I still get all the UK channels (including ITV HD) perfectly from Astra 28.x. Like stated elsewhere on this forum, if the DECT phone is too close to the LNB connector on the Set Top Box, the channels on the "weaker" transponders (such as Scuzz) have "signal problems", which do not exist when the DECT phone is move a little further away.

On the other Satellite angles I have issue with some weaker transponders on Hotbird 13 (Art package, and Abu Dhabi Sport), and Astra 19 (DSF) when the weather is really bad. However, I suspect this is because I have not perfectly aligned the dish.

If you only want UK channels then the standard 60 cm dish will do you proud (you should have no problems if it's correctly aligned).

If you fancy getting more non-UK channels then I recommend the 45cm Mutliynne (see here).

Both the Foxsat HD and Foxsat HDR are easily configured with this dish.

Might be skew. Maybe, when you moved it to 28E for the digital service, you didn't get the skew angle quite right but you did when you changed the LNB. Could also be that the new LNB is far superior as you first suggested.

I'm glad you raised this. It caused me to enjoy a good few minutes reminiscing about the good old days. There was only Astra 1A when I set up my first satellite receiver. No Sky then, as such, just Sky Channel. Got the dish going propped up on a patio chair so that I could get the feel of things before having to do the alignment from a step ladder. I hadn't heard of the wet towel trick then, but was very pleased with myself for developing the technique of using kitchen foil to cover part of the dish so as to get sparklies and then making fine alignment adjustments to get rid of them. In spite of the "perfect" alignment, I still got sparklies in heavy rain. My first receiver only had 16 channels with a seperate button for each one. I replaced it with a horrible Pace box when Astra 2B went up. It had to be unplugged if we wanted to watch ITV. It had a switch mode regulator that radiated harmonics right on ITV's Crystal Palace frequency. Oh, it was such fun then. I wasn't so interested in the extra channels then, but I wanted the technology because it was new. Nowadays, I'm more interested in the extra channels and pay a man to put up the dish and change the LNB for me. Still want the new technology, though, as long as it doesn't have a Sky label attached to it.

Get yourself Cablecon Professional Connectors and Instalation tool - £18 from Satelitte Superstore (tool + 10 connectors).

I did this and they're fantastic. No chance of water ingress.

Manufacturer guarantees waterproof to 2 bars of pressure!!!!

They fit so tight when installed the only way to remove them is to cut the cable.

2 bars of pressure! Wow, that means even during a severe flood, when your satellite dish is under 60 feet of water, you can still watch TV.

I wonder how big a dish that would need to overcome the bad weather effect

The only problem with that is that there is no weak point in the chain to cope with mechanical stress to the cable. In domestic situations this could mean "vacuuming" could very well cause a disastrous fall from the shelf instead of the cable pulling out of the connector.

Perhaps the heavy cloud is weighing down on the satellite dish, causing it to move