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!)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
An annual subscription to one of the main TV packages in Ireland will cost you \u20ac276 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading “No Such Thing as a Free Meal – Free TV on the Other Hand…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":847,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168\/revisions\/847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}