0Get free-to-air HD Satellite TV for under £100

I recently got fed up with my poor TV recep­tion and inab­il­ity to get BBC via Freeview and decided to invest­ig­ate Freesat. Look­ing at the high street the best deals I could find were £70 for a view­er box + £80 for install­a­tion (a total of £150). For record­ing facil­it­ies this rises steeply to over £300 for the box + install­a­tion. This looks to me a bit like an early-adop­ters-tax so I decided to search for altern­at­ives. The out­come of my research was that it is easy and rel­at­ively cheap to obtain and install all the neces­sary equip­ment to set up Freesat on a PC. As it hap­pens I actu­ally already had a media PC so this solu­tion was ideal for me.

The kit required is as fol­lows (with what I paid as a guide):
Satel­lite dish — £16
LNB (if not included with dish) — £6
100m CT100 cable — £24
F Plugs — £1
Card for PC — £30
Satel­lite sig­nal metre — £7
TOTAL = £84

Set­ting up the dish was straight­for­ward — elev­ate the dish (tak­ing into account the dish off­set) to the cor­rect elev­a­tion and then adjust the angle of the dish to loc­ate the cor­rect satel­lite cluster. There is a very help­ful satel­lite dish align­ment cal­cu­lat­or provided at Sat Sig