My ancient TV has finally died, so am looking for a replacement. Ideally a 32″ SMART TV, from a good brand like Samsung, Panasonic etc.

Currently I connect via a Satelite dish and a Sky box (don’t use pay for services, just the free channels). But it would appear that most new TVs have a Freeview tuner, not a Freesat one. So what is the best way of connecting to my Sat dish? (I guess I could continue to use the sky box but that is old and playing up too, plus it would be good to not have lots of separate boxes and cables)

Any advice?

Sue, we were in the same position, you just need a Freesat box between the dish and TV. Looking at the options on Amazon below there seems to be a wide variation in price but we just went for one of the cheapest and it’s perfectly OK.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/freesat-box-Electronics-Photo/s?ie=UTF8&keywords=freesat%20box&page=1&rh=n%3A560798%2Ck%3Afreesat%20box

remove sky dish

fit aerial.

gets rid of a remote as well.

First there’s two Freesats: Sky’s and “the BBC’s” (for want of a better description).

I don’t know about the sky version.

Panasonic do TVs with inbuilt Freesat. The “Smart” versions seem proper expensive though.

I know you dont want a separate box but an external Freesat recorder ( pause, rewind, record without having to wait for the lower quality iplayer version) is great.

Either way the dish, cables etc will be the same as what you have now (note if you want to record – you’d currently have to have Sky+ with the twin cable from the dish)

As well as the panasonics, Samsung do 32″ freesat enabled TVs too with John Lewis selling them for <£800. They are smart and 3D enabled too, but that might be overkill for your needs. I agree with getting a separate box for recording too though. Very very useful.

if the tv has he satellite cable connections, just take them out of the sky box and plug them into the tv and away you go.

i dont know if there are 2 types of freesat, but we had sky and simply replaced the box with a humax one. This gave us access to many more channels than the sky ‘free’ box did.

note if you want to record – you’d currently have to have Sky+ with the twin cable from the dish)

Or modify your current Sky dish so that you replace the central ‘thingy’ with one that has two cables coming from it 🙂

Smsung… I picked up our 46″ monster (UE6800 I think it was) from John Lewis for a prices matched from some place in Yorkshire. It’s superb and connected to our freesat feed with no problems at all.

When it moved rooms the other week, it had to lower itself to normal freeview, but it did that with ease. Good picture too.