|
Satellite, Tv, Comms. & Audio
SATELLITE TV
Satellite tv is quite popular in the United Kingdom. Most satellite owners use the Astra Satellite which beams in the Sky TV package. Sky is a subscription service with many channels. Some of these are Premium channels which cost more to receive. We have a small mini-dish hidden behind our roof chimney to get Sky, We use a Sky+ receiver/hard drive recorder unit to watch Sky. This is a wonderfiul piece of gear. It can pause the live tv programme, if you have to amswer the telephone for example, and then continue from where you paused when you finish the call. So you don’t miss anything.
It is also a video recorder using a hard drive. No tapes. Setting up programmes to record is very simple using the Sky EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) which is always up todate with any programme changes. It even remembers your favourite programmes and records them automatically. It also has a digital sound output. So you not only get a great picture but the sound is really brilliant
As we watch so few of the subscription Sky channels, we decided to just use the Freesat package which gives us all the channels we need and costs us nothing other than the £10 we pay a month to keep the Sky+ box facilities. We wouldn’t want to be without that!
We also have another satellite tuner connected to the 80cm dish in the picture at the top of the page. This allows us access to two other satellites. The Astra satellites at 19 degrees east and Hot Bird satellites at 20 degrees. The tuner is an Echostar DSB808 digital unit. This combination gives us access to many free to air digital tv channels.
The variety of television is quite remarkable. Talk about "surfing the Net"... "surfing the satellites" can be just as interesting.
TELEVISION AND SOUND
We have recently upgraded to a projection TV system. We have a large pull down screen giving us a 5 1/2ft wide x 4 1/4ft high picture! A Sony projector is connected to our Sky+ tuner and of course can also be connected to other devices such as DVD, movie or still digital cameras and even a computer. We feed all our tv audio into a Yamaha DSP-A595 Audio Visual amplifier which is connected to a pair of Gale front loudspeakers and Gale back speakers too. We also have a Gale sub bass woofer. This really gives very good sound from whatever source.
COMMS.
Until September 2004 the telephone service that the cable company Telewest (now Virgin) provided us with in this area was less expensive than British Telecom. These days though competition in the telecoms field has become much greater and through a combination of circumstances we returned to BT.
The main problem using Telewest cable was that if you wanted to use another company for cheaper telephone calls etc., there are many services provided by these companies that cannot be accessed by a cable company and those services that can, are quite difficult to use. Rejoining BT gives us easy access to the cheaper telephone call providers. But even the cheaper providers are not really needed now as BT themselves have comparative options. We have just taken up their new Anytime Calls package. This gives us completely free calls to 01, 02 and 03 numbers for the first 3 months at anytime and then £7.95 a month for the last 9 months of the annual contract. Of course there is the £10.50 line rental per month on top of that, but you always have to pay line rental anyway. This deal also offers cut costs for calls to mobiles and 200 free text messages if your home phone has the text facailty. Our Panasonic DECT phones have.
Our mobiles are from 3 Mobile and after the first year with them, we have been given a “loyalty deal” with monthly rental of £5 (for life, whatever that means) with 500 minutes on any network and 100 texts each month included. Plenty for us. Details on good deals in Telecoms and other things too, can be found on Money Saving Expert.
We had started dabbling with voip for telephone calls using the computer with a microphone and speakers or headphones. We found this company called VoipCheap, but we don’t need that now that we have the “free” call facilities on landline and mobile.
OUR INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER
After many years on dialup we started using an ADSL service in 2003 but in 2005 we went over to to Telewest Cable Blueyonder 2Mb package. We then were upgraded to the 10Mb service which was very stable but cost £35 a month. Believe it or not we found that we really didn’t need such a high speed at that time and it was a bit costly too, so went down to 4Mb speed at £25 a month. Telewest certainly give a very stable connection and full download speed. Cable is much better than ADSL for constant speed reliability.
But at the beginning of 2007 ADSL2+ opened in our local exchange and we have now switched to that using Be*Unlimited. From them we get a steady fast download speed of 10Mb and an upload speed of 1.3Mb. Although if you have a really good telephone line you can achieve up to 24Mb connection speed. Cost for that is extremely good value at £18 a month. If your exchange is LLU’d by BE* or O2 (Be* is owned by O2 and they both use the same infrastructure), it is well worth taking a look at them. They are highly rated ISPs.
AUDIO
We have been interested in hi-fi for many years going right back to the 50s and our first valve stereo amplifier was an HMV 'Stereoscope'. Wish we still had that as it would probably be worth a lot of money by now.
Today we have an Audiolab which feeds a couple of Tannoy Sixes. Feeding the amp is a tuner, a couple of turntables, cassette deck and two cd player decks. Recently though we have been introduced to the world of the MiniDisc through our local drama group, The Dumbarton People's Theatre. They use this system for their SFX.
We were so impressed with the system which gives very near CD quality that we have added a MiniDisc deck to our system. It is a Sony MDS-JE510 which both records and replays with excellent results.
We are very keen on outside recording and over many years have used a semi-professional Sony Walkman cassette recorder. Unfortunately this machine has reached the end of its life and we thought about a replacement. The model is still available at around £300 ($450) but we found that Sony have a Walkman style MiniDisc recorder which is smaller than the cassette machine but offers all the quality of the MiniDisc deck. Since the price was the same as that for the cassette recorder we plumped for the Sony MZ-R30.
One of the big advantages to us of the MiniDisc is its editing facilities which were certainly lacking using the cassette system. But now there is CD recording!
As the computer age advances and it is so easy to record CDs now, we decided to add a DVD recorder to our audio/video setup. It is a Philips and records DVDs easily. Amazing the progress in this area.
|
