[vdr] Re: Basic question

[Christian Berger <einStein@donau.de>]

Am Dienstag, 30. Juli 2002 16:23 schrieben Sie:
> Hi,
>
> After using vdr on the job for quite a while my b/f and me are thinking
> about getting a dish and
> card for our own home.  Which is in Germany, btw.

Good, you can recieve a lot of satellites from germany.

> I'd like to know
> a) we can only mount the dish on a slightly retired balcony facing east
> with a good view (hillside), is this feasible?

Well Astra is at about 19°East, so if you look south, the satellite is 
about 19degrees "left of south". The satellite also is preety high up 
there, but I guess that's no problem in your case.

> b) what size and kind of dish do we need? which is cheapest?

Well for a single reciever, 60cm is best, you can of course also use 55 or 
65cm. I would not use anything smaller than 40cm. (althought it might work)
I would recommend you buying a good LNC (also called LNB) which is the 
recieving part of your dish. There really are great differences between 
the cheap ones and the more expensive ones.
The LNB also determines how many recievers/cards you can connect. For 
purely analog reception you can connect any number of recievers with just 
2 outputs, but for digital reception, you either choose a single output 
for a single reciever, or 2 outputs for 2 recievers for 4 outputs for more 
recievers.

You might also want to consider getting a multifeed dish and a second LNB 
to be able to recieve 2 satellites. If you want to save costs and are good 
at mechanical things, you could also build the second feed for the dish 
yourself. Then you'd also need a Diseq switch.

For setting it up I would recommend you consulting an expert to asure good 
allignment. Some shops might lend you their equipment which is usually 
moderately easy to use. (if you know what you do)

> c)what card can you recommend? Again, money is mighty tight. Would a
> decoder box be better, since we need to get the stuff on TV? TV out
> connector is available, though. Well, what I'd really like is getting
> the stuff on screen for normal viewing easily. (b/f is no linux crack)
> and be able to record it with vdr (new toy).

Well this really depends on what you want to do.
If you only want to get the analog channels (there are still quite a lot 
of them and they are not going to disappear soon), I would recommend you a 
good analog reciever for about 100Euro. (again the cheap ones are 
considerably worse, you can actually see the difference on many TVs)

If you only want to see analog channels on a small monocrome TV, even a 
cheap analog reciever might work for you. (those 50 Euro boxes)

If you want to have digital this again depends on your needs. Cheap FTA 
(=free to air, they do not decode PAY-TV channels) are probably the best 
for normal TV-viewing. There are also big differences in the installed 
software like how they react to new channels and all.

Well if you want to record to harddisks and have a spare computer with 
large harddisks you want to put into your living room, you can get a 
normal DVB card. http://www.linuxtv.org/dvb/market.xml has a nice list of 
them. I personally like those Version 1.3 cards because of their 
RGB-outputs, but they aren't produced anymore, but the others are 
acceptable, too. The typical card is the Hauppauge WinTV Nexus-s.

I wouldn't recommend PAY-TV since you can already get several hundreds of 
channels without paying extra fees.

> d) have I forgotten anything? We do have an electrical engineer friend
> who can mount the disk correctly and lay the cables inside.
>   I hope he can get us a used dish, too.

Ohh the dish itself is no problem, those are only $15 or so. Make sure 
there are no bumps or anything. Scratches might get it to rust.

> Sabine

Servus
  Casandro
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