Job’s a good’un!

And, yes, I’m as surprised as anyone! Yesterday I finished running my satellite cable through the roof of my ‘grenier’, down the side of the chimney up there and through the floor into the corner of my ‘sejour’ where I wanted to have my television. In the process, while descending the outside wooden staircase, the bottom two stairs that were obviously a bit rotten, collapsed, so I already have another job lined up 😐 At the end of it all, I faced a classical dilemma. I’m already well up on my monthly budget having laid out a wad of cash on the X-Air bits I recently purchased but I would have no idea whether all the work I’d done installing the satellite system was worth it or not unless I connected something to it.

I thought about buying an inexpensive tuner card for my PC on Ebay to test it with but couldn’t see the point of doing that because I didn’t really want it. It would be a waste of money, and it would have taken several days to be delivered anyway, so I rejected the idea. All the while I had a little green devil on my shoulder reminding me about the gorgeous 42″ Panasonic LED TV that I’d seen on Promo at Boulanger on Saturday but I kept telling him to buzz off. Until about 5.30pm that was. In the meantime I’d checked the TV out again on the Boulanger web site and been impressed yet again by it’s specification compared to other similar models at around the same price (OK, OK, just a little less maybe…) at Leclerc and elsewhere and also noticed that the ‘magasin Boulanger’ at Trelissac stays open until 7.30pm. In the end the little green devil got the best of me. He reasoned that, what the heck, you only live once… so Toddie and I found ourselves shortly thereafter heading off in the car with destination Trelissac. With the day almost over, there was hardly anyone else in the shop and the young chap who served me was a bit bowled over by how easy it was to make such a hefty sale! A few minutes later he and I were loading the TV into the back of my car – together with the complementary pen and plastic shopping bag so generously provided by Boulanger 🙂

Now, if I was to pretend that it was plain sailing getting the system connected up and working, I’d be telling a little fib. I tried to use the set up instructions that came with the TV but kept ending up with the ‘no signal detected’ message. I disconnected my mum’s old Freesat box and tested the signal it was receiving using my precision Chinese satellite signal detector and was pleasantly surprised to see that there was a signal down at the TV end – a bit lower than up at the dish, but that wasn’t surprising as now there were about 30 metres of cable in between. But with the blue light glowing on the Freesat box and the TV connected, I just couldn’t get anything on the TV at all. I then realised that I’d used an accessory lead to connect the SCART from the Freesat to the AV1 port on the TV, but after changing the setting on the TV and several more minutes of fiddling, still nothing. I then decided that it was time to give up and pressed the button with the blue light on the Freesat box to switch it off. When I did so I immediately got a fantastic picture with sound of the Federer – Djokovic tennis final at the O2 in London! Obviously the blue light showed the box was on standby and the light goes out when it’s switched on. How stupid for the instruction booklet that came with the Freesat box, that I have, not to mention such an obvious thing 😐

When I got into the Freesat box system menu, I was pleasantly surprised to find that against a minimum acceptable signal strength of 50% my system was showing a reading of 75%. I don’t claim to be any kind of expert as a result of this – I think that the web site I found that shows you where to point your dish to find your chosen satellite has to take the most credit – but I am nevertheless very happy with what I’ve managed to achieve with kit that I originally bought for use in the UK and which some people told me not to bother wasting my time carting all the way down through France. I still have a lot of exploring to do with the system, but I now have a brilliant TV system with all of the free-to-air UK satellite stations. As Sky uses the same satellite(s), I now also have the option of adding a Sky subscription service in the future since although Sky are not supposed to provide a service outside of the UK, they turn a blind eye to the many thousands of ex-pats all over Europe (the world?) who have systems set up to receive it. But anyway, at least I’ve managed to tick one of my to-do boxes for this week 😉