F1 for free?????

Like many others, I refuse to pay $ky to watch.

It looks as if it is available free though, on RTL

Problem is there are lots of RTL channels, and they only seem to have numbers, RTL1, RTL2 etc, anyone any idea which one?

The satellite info for those who can look and are interested in watching free is....

ASTRA 1, 19 degrees east
RTL GERMANY DIGITAL
FREQUENCY 12188
HORIZONTAL SYMBOL RATE 27.500
FEC 3/4

Edited By Steve W-O on 10/03/2012 12:01:40

Oooh thanks Steve. Spare dish and eagle box might be coming out soon

My lad might be interested in this as not only does he love his F1, but he's doing a German/Spanish degree. So he might understand the commentary while I look on bemused

Edited By Chris Bott - Moderator on 10/03/2012 13:22:41

Well I get totally bemused by the english speaking comentators so perhaps an advantage in not understanding the language

Its still on BBC, as well as sky.

Regards

Chris.

You're lucky, my BBC is only showing half of them

Well, I will have it in English, I will just set the AV amp to put Five Live through the audio, and RTL through the the video.

Now I have to retune the sat receiver though, Astra at 28.5 has been changed, so the old channels don't work, and the Astra 1N has been added to the list, so it is a right mess.

I did a factory reset and deleted all the sats and channels, then when trying a blind searchvered the dish was moving to the wrong place on some sats, so have had to tell it to recalculate and search again.

It is not plain sailing, as the last time I looked at the instructions was about 3 years ago, all I use it for is watching the news (we have another one downstairs that is fixed to Astra 2)

Oh dear that all sounds very complicated.

I only got as fat as a fixed sky dish, now unused, plus a dish on a tripod that I manually move. So I just need to get that out and find Astra 1. Thankfully I have an iPhone app that looks at the sky and superimposes the satellites over the view.

PS, I like the 5live idea, I have a nice portable DAB radio

Edited By Chris Bott - Moderator on 10/03/2012 14:57:31

I isten to 5L on MW which is always about 5sec ahead of the tele so if I was busy building the radio told you about the crash and you had time to look up and catch it "live" works great for the football and cricket also

Radio is a sore point with me, our DAB reception is lousy, only works near a window upstairs, then breaks up and pops.

And they want to shut down FM?

I installed a 1m motorised dish about 5 years ago, then added a conservatory, which limts to about 45deg west, and the bay trees have grown nicely on the otherside, limiting me to about 40deg east.

The iphone idea is great, but does it take the dish offset into account? Or do you just have to estimate that? Luckily Thor is only 1deg off due south, so I use that as a reference, and go from there.

[This posting has been removed]

Eric

I am on Virgin, I do not think it is available without an additional charge, for sky sport

Perhaps you should consider eating a little less?

Steve: Astra 1N is in the same part of the sky as the main "Astra 2" group at 28.2 radial, which includes 2D which is where we get our Freesat from. The main 1 group is at 19.2 radial.

12188 H is on Transponder 89 on Astra 1L, at 19.2 radial.

If you want to know where the Astra 1 satellite group is in the sky just look at

http://www.lyngsat.com/tracker/Astra-1L.html and if necessary click on the Sat Tracker link and then on the map for your position.

I see the result as Azimuth 154 (true) and Elevation 28. I live near Tunbridge Wells.

Edited By John Cole on 10/03/2012 19:50:14

I thought the Beeb was doing half the races live, the rest to be recorded and transmitted at a later time?

Sky - you need to be on a HD package to get F1, with Virgin you need to buy the Sport package. I'm on Sky this week, will be on Virgin next week and probably won't buy the Sport pack in order to get live F1. There looks to be a lot of reruns of years gone by, more analysis and 'behind the scenes' type of of stuff and lots of BS to fill in the hours from what I've seen of the first two days schedules.

Similarly I like to keep an eye on the live timing screen via the 'net. You might expect that to lag behind the TV coverage, but it's usually several seconds ahead of even the terrestrial TV coverage. Makes you wonder where the TV coverage gets sent before it finally ends up on our tellies!

In any case, the man from Sky is due round between 10 and 12 tomorrow morning to upgrade me from bog-standard Sky to Sky HD (inc the F1 channel)

Edited By John Privett on 10/03/2012 22:00:28

Yes John, and many of the channels that were on Astra 2 have moved to 1N, which is how I ended up with a lot that didn't work. (wasnt there a story that 1N will be moved to 19deg some time in the futeure?)

I don't have any problem finding them, just that Thor is easy to find as the disc will be square onto it in azimuth, which is not the case as you move to either side. Find l the box to recaculate all the rest from that, as long as the mounting is vertical, and the inclination is adjusted correctly, the rest are fine. I get ove 92% on signal strength and quality, which is good enough for me.

I found this link from SatShop: http://www.satshop.co.uk/content65/Formula-1-2012-.html

They are my local specialist, but a Rx from Lidl would do just as well, but cheaper! Me: I bought one off Ebay for £7. You can get complete caravan (i.e. portable) systems for not much more.

You can see the RTL transmission schedule on their website sports page:

http://www.rtl.de/cms/sport.html and then click on the link which says:

"Formel 1 live bei RTL TV und hier im Netz"

JohnP: "where is the picture before it gets to my telly?" Good question, to which there are several parts to the answer. I just tried an experiment with a few TVs. They were:

A Old analogue TV receiving analogue signals

B Digital TV receiving analogue signals

C Digital TV receiving digital terrestrial signals (FreeView)

D Digital TV receiving digital satellite signals (FreeSat).

I expected that there would be a delay between B & C - time for the BBC to digitise the signal and that there would be one between C & D - time to make the uplink and downlink. I was correct on C/D. What I didn't expect was that there is also a delay between A and B - and that's for my digital TV to digitise the analogue signal locally to build the digitally-displayed picture. The sound is buffered so it matches the picture (lip synch). I was using the same TV for B and C so I wans not able to see if there was any difference, but I would now expect C to come earlier than B (BBC has a bigger / better / faster digisiter, I expect!).

The sound is almost certain not to be perfectly synced, but if you can see the picture, the sound isn't really needed, it won't matter if it is a bit out.

My AV amps all have audio delay, hopefully it will work, other wise it could easily be fed into a PC and adjusted, the whole thing will be delayed a second or so, but does it matter?

I will be happy to see it, and have the English commentary in the background.

As for different systems having different delays, two $ky boxes in the same house, fed from the same dish are always out of sync (maybe not if you used two identical boxes).

The terrestial digital may wll get its feed from satellite, so would have the same path delay as satellite, and each system would have different processing times as well.

I'm just pleased I willsee it for free

Steve: I'm not sure you've had an answer to your original question - which RTL channel.

I believe the answer is RTL Deutschland (SID 12003). For me that came up as the first additional channel when I searched on that TP. I'm now all set up, and I find that the other "RTL" channels (I mean those that are called RTL, not RTL2, Super RTL, RTL Living) are just regional variations of the national channel. I also find that only the national channel has "event" data - i.e. supports now/next and the EPG. I also find that, although SD RTL is FTA, HD RTL is not!

Watching the qualifying, absolutely perfect.

Picture on satellite, and sound on Five Live.

I think the people on Five are watching the same feed, as there is no lag at all, even the gear shifts tie up with the picture.

I don't see $ky leaving this possibility open for too long, they are far too greedy, even though there are probably not many people watching like this.

The only problem is in the pitlane commentary, but that isn't the race!