current aerial dead and in need of HD. Freeview or freesat?

[paultownsend]

so my currenet aerials dead. the wire is rusted, and im lucky to get 30 channels through my lg's freeview tuner. sometimes only 10.

i have two choices.

pay someone to fit a new aeriel £120 and buy humax hd freeview box £100

or replace existing crusty sky dish £40 and fit myself, and buy humax, technisat freesat box

i live in a three story cottage so its a no no for me to get to the roof, but the dish is eiight foot from the ground and i can throw the lead over and tack it down

which represents the best picture quality? or is it a simple choice of what channels i prefer?

my neighbour has sky and in sd im not at all impressed, but hd is fantastic

Paul

Edited by paultownsend on Monday 25th April 13:00

[vtecstu]

Can't help with which is better I'm afraid (having seen neither!) but have you checked that you can get Freeview HD currently?

I live near Reading and they're not giving me HD until February 2012. In the meantime, my non-HD digital signal isn't fantastic and prone to breaking up depending on weather conditions. The digital switchover (which is obviously when they turn off analogue signals but also turn on the Freeview HD signal) supposedly increases the digital signal strength ten-fold, which I'm hoping eliminates the signal breakup I get (despite having two boosters between aerial and TV) as well as giving me some HD channels.

Might have the same upside on your signal with existing kit if it's yet to switchover in your area (assuming you can put up with the poor signal up to that point, of course).

[Road2Ruin]

I get both and I personnally prefer freesat, but I know some people see it the other way round (see what I did there). Anyway, There are some channels on freesat that aren't on freeview and vicky what's her name, so look the channels up and base your decission on that I think.

[igiveup]

Picture wise it has to be Freesat. Freeview HD seems a tad pixeley to me still. I'd be surprised if your dish needs replacing though.

[HebdenHedgehog]

We had Freesat installed last year, with a Technisat HDFS box.

Picture quality has been great (compared to SD freeview) and that's not even on a HD telly (although it is a 100mhz Loewe - CRT), although during heavy rain the picture tends to start to break up, something common with satellite dishes apparently although we'd never heard of it before!

Channel-wise, we do miss 'Dave', which isn't one of the Freesat channels...and there are far too many cookery / shopping channels on there, but then we just ignore those so no real biggy.

If you can get a box which has two inputs then I'd get one of those as although we're very happy with the Technisat box, only having one input = lack of choice when recording / watching. We added a external HDD which is fab, although 500mb was a bit big! The connectivity with this set up is impressive, you can add iPlayer etc

[paultownsend]

top replies guys. il check out the switchover dates etc

[igiveup]

No need to wait for Frees, unless you have choosen freeview.