If you resent paying Uncle Rupert’s Sky TV £15 to watch Saturday’s boxing match, there is a way you can watch it on your TV for free, and it’s legal too.
The only catch is that you’ll need a satellite dish that’s pointing in a slightly different direction to the one you use for Sky TV.
If you’ve got an old Sky Analogue dish on your wall somewhere, and it’s in working order, that’ll do nicely! You could, if you wanted, re-align your current Sky Satellite dish to point to the correct satellite, but that’s tricky if you’ve never done that sort of thing before, and you may well end up with a service call to Sky that’ll cost more than the £15 you saved on the boxing.
How is this free? Well, German channel RTL Television is showing the boxing free to air on Saturday, broadcast from the (mostly) German satellite Astra at 19.2 East. That’s where the old Sky Analogue service used to live, so Sky Analogue dishes pointed there.
So, assuming you’ve got a Sky Digibox of some sort, and a dish that’s pointing to Astra 19.2 East, here’s what you do.
Turn the digibox off, and disconnect the current connections to your Sky minidish. Connect it instead to the dish pointing at 19.2 East.
Turn it on again. It’ll complain there’s no signal. Don’t panic! It’s looking for a signal that isn’t on that satellite.
Go to SERVICES, then SYSTEM SETUP, then ADD CHANNELS. You’ll see this screen :
Enter the details as shown here :
Frequency : 12.188
Polarisation : H
Symbol Rate : 27.5
FEC : 3/4
Then select FIND CHANNELS.
If the dish is correctly aligned and it’s all working, you’ll see a list of channels on the transponder that you just chose. Use the yellow button to mark RTL TELEVISION and press select when done.
That’s it! To view the channel, you’ll need to press services, and choose option OTHER CHANNELS, as shown here.
You’ll then see a list of channels that you’ve added. Choose it and…
There’s RTL Television, on a Sky Digibox :)
You won’t get a TV guide, but RTL’s coverage of the boxing starts at 20:30 BST on Saturday 2nd July.
Naturally, being a German station, the commentary will be in German too. If you want English, you could mute the TV sound and listen to the coverage on Radio 5 while you watch the TV.
Knowing the frequency of other transponders, you can of course add lots of other channels from this satellite, which you can enjoy until you have to reconnect the Sky Dish to watch usual UK TV.
The match is also free on a few other satellites, I’ve chosen Astra 19.2E here because it’s easy to locate and Sky Analogue dishes pointed at it. For full details of other channels showing the boxing for free, see this site here : Live On Sat
I hope this has been of use!
