Turkish TV from Eutelsat W3A.
As you may well be aware, most of the Turkish channels available in northern Europe are transmitted off the Turksat satellites which are slotted at 42°E. However, Turksat reception can cause problems as it the satellites are much lower in the sky than the Astra and Hotbird clusters, and therefore many people find that buildings get in the way of these birds. However, there is good news if you are desperate for Turkish TV, as there are now a handful of free to air Turkish channels available off the new Eutelsat W3A located at 7°E.
In the past these channels were transmitted off the older Eutelsat W3 on a spotbeam which was centred on the Aegean. This meant that in the UK, the signals from the Digiturk package were only available on very big dishes. However, the new satellite has different transmission characteristics and the Turkish channels can be picked up easily on an 80cm dish here in the Scottish Borders.
Technical details of the footprints used by W3A can be found here, and if you are interested, technical details of the satellite can be found here.
The free to air Turkish tv channels currently available on W3A are:
TRT 1 / 2 / 3 & gap
Turkiye Jokey Kulubu (mainly horse racing)
Sky Turk (news)
Showroom (shopping)
Radio channels:
TRT FM
TRT Radyo 3
Current frequency details for the fta tv services can be found on my W3A frequency page.
The full Digiturk channel line up can be found
on the Lyngsat
site, although the majority of the channels are scrambled using Cryptoworks and would
therefore need an official subscription card and a suitable receiver. (Dont email asking
for details of how to get the services without paying because I dont know).
If you just want the free channels almost any old 80cm dish will be ok as long as it isnt
too badly battered. I use a very second hand old dish - which I found dumped in the local
woodland! It was rather bent, but half an hour carefully straightening it out, and it
works fine for W3A. Add in an LNB I had lying around, and the extra dish didnt cost me
anything. And I helped tidy up the local environment a bit too, which has to be a good
thing.
If you would like to receive these channels,
but you have to buy new, then why not think about a nice fta receiver and 80cm dish
combination from Satcure?
Pick your dish from one of these,
and make sure you get a suitable universal LNB with it.
As for receivers, you have quite a choice, although the Technomate's seem to be highly recommended by most of their users. The one I got to play with for an hour over summer 2004 impressed me a lot. That particular one was a 5500DACI
Dont forget to use your Satcure voucher. This will give you a small discount on your order :-)
If you arrived here from a search engine and dont see the frameset, click here to get to the front page.
The web site will not work properly if you dont.