If you really want to watch the Alex Salmond vs Alastair Darling TV debate on Scottish independence this evening, and you’re outside Scotland, and you’re determined to watch it on a large screen, but your broadband isn’t up to watching it online, and you have a Sky Digital or Freesat satellite box… still with me? Then I have good news.
Your satellite set-top box knows where you live, and uses this to show you ‘your’ local BBC and ITV region. All the regional signals are available to your box; but it just decides which ones to offer you up-front. You can, however, add other regions manually.
Look around your setup menu for an ‘Add Channel’ option. (You may need to manually enable non-Freesat channels on a Freesat box.)
You’ll end up on a screen asking you for some technical details of what signal frequency to search on. Enter the following:
- Frequency: 10906
- Polarisation: Vertical
- Symbol rate: 22000
- FEC: 5/6
You should now see a handful of channels, including (when I did it just now) several STV options. Select one of these, then save your changes. Now look for an ‘Other channels’ option: and you should now see STV listed.
If you want it in HD, you’ll need different settings – which, I believe, are:
- Frequency: 10994
- Polarisation: Horizontal
- Symbol rate: 22000
- FEC: 5/6
Frequency data courtesy of a516digital and Wikipedia.