The Very Early Telly Thread

What were channels 2-5 allocated for?

On my old Pace box, I remember 2 being for Sky News.

A trawlback through the Wiki history suggests they were as follows:

Channel 2: Sky News
Channel 3: Sky Sports
Channel 4: Sky Movies
Channel 5: Movie Channel

Channels 3-5 were not part of Multichannels, they were the premium channels, with the exception of Sky News that was FTA.

I remember around 1996-98 there was an increase of the multi-channels, so the original Amstrad receivers couldn't cope with them. Around this time, receivers and LNB's had a wider range of frequencies, so they received the new channels.

I forgot about the battles I had on that dam page, OH there not part of the package YET there added to the package

That list is quite wrong in many ways!

Due to the reluctance of my parents refusing to have a satellite dish on our house, we had cable, never had that any channel problems like this. But to be fair the cable companies created their own messy channel arrangements.

I remember when my auntie and uncle moved into a house that had on old analogue sky dish, and when they had got Sky Digital installed, the engineer somehow managed to get Digital through the Analogue dish so they never had a Minidish installed.

Any idea on how the engineer would have managed that?

Just by moving the dish from 19.2 to 28.2E, not particularly difficult.

Quite easily, just change where it points at and possibly replace the LNB

A dish is a dish at the end of the day; it just reflects the satellite signal into the LNB. It would have been pointed at 19.2° East for analogue. Just a case of replacing/aligning the LNB and realigning the dish to 28.2° East and replacing the cables.

I also remember in the latter days of Sky analogue that some customers had a slightly smaller dish, I think it was around 48/49cm in London and the South East. I was given a 60cm dish when I got my system.