When we moved to our current home a few years ago, we decided that rather than endure the hassle and expense of a subscription-based service for our TV needs, we’d look into setting up a system to receive TV for free. (Aside from the TV license which we loyally cough up for every year!)
We started off with a Free-to-Air kit from Lidl for the UK channels and rabbit ears for the Irish, but over the years we’ve fine tuned and tweaked our system to suit our needs.
An annual subscription to one of the main TV packages in Ireland will cost you €276 for a one-TV setup. You can set up your own “free” system using the components described below for a similar cost, plus a weekend of DIY and geeking that will either make or break your relationship with the people you live with, but once it’s in place there’s no ongoing fee.
Equipment
- Satellite dish – These are available all over the place. They show up regularly in Aldi and Lidl (usually including a satellite decoder box), or can be purchased in most big hardware stores, like B&Q. If you’re already signed up to one of the big satellite companies, chances are your contract says that once you’re out of your minimum term you get to keep your dish. For the typical channels of interest to an Irish audience, you’ll want to point at the Astra 2 satellite at 28.2° East. If you fancy an alternative selection of channels, check the lists on lyngsat.com to see which satellite broadcasts the ones you’re after.
Cost: Free -~€80. - LNB – The LNB is the little box that sits at the end of the satellite dish’s arm reading the signal collected by the dish. You’ll usually get one of these with your dish, but double check in case you need to buy one separately. Because the LNB is an active element of the circuit, you’ll need a connection on it for each TV you want to connect to the dish: don’t try using splitters on your cables, it won’t work. Each decoder box in your house needs its own LNB connection, and the box sends an instruction to the LNB saying which channel it wants separated out from the hundreds picked up by the dish.
Cost: A bit over a tenner for a single LNB, up to ~€40 for a quad/octo LNB. - Terrestrial antenna – The Saorview Irish channels aren’t currently broadcast via satellite, so you’ll need a terrestrial antenna to pick these up. Look for DVB-T written on the box. Depending on how close you are to a transmitter (see map), you could get away with anything from a booster with rabbit ears beside your TV, to a big spikey antenna in your attic or on your roof.
Cost: €20 to crazy money. - Coax cable and F connectors – You’ll need coax to hook your satellite dish and/or terrestrial antenna to your decoder box(es), with F connectors at each end. How much cable you need is highly dependent on where your dish/antenna is located and how many decoder boxes you’re using. Dish kits often include a reasonable length for free.
Cost: 100m spools of coax go for ~€30-60. Connectors are less than a euro each. - Decoder box – You can go for separate boxes for the satellite signal and the terrestrial signal, or a fancier box that will do both. We went with the latter – cuts down on hardware, and power and TV connections. Our box is a Ferguson Ariva HD Combo, which in addition to decoding both satellite and terrestrial signals also has a USB connector so you can hook up an external hard drive and use PVR functions (pause/rewind live TV, and record programs to hard disk).
Cost: ~€180-200 for the new edition of the Ferguson Ariva box. - TV – I’m not factoring this into the overall kit cost, but make sure you have something to watch programs on once everything else is in place (a TV, projector or computer), check what connectors you have (Scart/AV/HDMI/…) and make sure they’re compatible with the decoder box you want to use. Dave picked our TV so it has silly numbers of connectors of every flavour, just in case – once a sys admin, always a sys admin.
If you’re looking for places to start locating all these bits and pieces, places we’ve used for ourselves and friends/family we’ve helped get their own set ups going are: Aldi and Lidl (seasonal availability), freesat.ie in Fairview (helpful, friendly guys), B&Q, Maplins and Peats. And ask around for spare parts – anyone who’s started out with a kit system may well have dishes, cable or decoder boxes lying around gathering dust – we’ve rehomed a fair amount of kit as we went through the fine-tuning process.
Finally, once you’re all set up, if you’re in search of a nice, customisable TV listing tool to go with your custom installation, check out the TV Guide app/web site.
