Elgato EyeTV Sat: the missing Freesat settings

24 July 2009 Rob Buckley Technology 13 Comments

Elgato EyeTV Sat

For a big chunk of this week, I’ve been fighting to the death with an Elgato EyeTV Sat box. This is a nifty little gadget that lets you get Freesat on your Mac, including BBC HD in full high def quality, provided you

  1. Live in the UK
  2. Have a satellite dish and a spare lead from it somewhere
  3. Have £180 or so

The full review is going to be in MacFormat issue 212, so you’ll have to wait until then for my full review of it. However, one of the issues I had was actually tuning it to receive all the Freesat channels, since the auto-tune failed to pick up big chunks of them (including Channel 4, More4, E4, Film4, BBC3, BBC4, ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4 as well as their time-shifted siblings). Elgato swear this shouldn’t be a problem, but it was.

Fortunately, after a bit of liaising with Elgato over the settings, I was able to get all the channels. Since Elgato doesn’t seem to want to publish them on its web site according to my exchanges with them – and since MacFormat simply won’t have the space to print all this – after the jump, all the settings an EyeTV Sat owner might need to get his or her box working properly.

I suspect I might get as many as 10 or even 20 hits on this page, but I figured it might be useful to some people. The rest of you? As you were.

First up, remember that some channels aren’t 24/7 and so won’t be picked up by the EyeTV Sat box unless they’re broadcasting. So wait until after 7pm for BBC3 and BBC4 and say 9pm with ITV1 HD. ITV1 HD, incidentally, is ‘frequency agile’ and so may be on a different frequency every night, which means you’ll have to retune it when you do – if you have a Freesat box, you’d have to press the ‘red button’ to do this, so it’s not an EyeTV Sat-particular problem.

Secondly, bad weather and a poor signal can also stop auto-tune from working, so bear that in mind.

But if auto-tune doesn’t pick up particular channels, even if they are broadcasting, you’re getting a good signal, you’ve selected the Astra satellite and the weather is fine, you’ll need to use the “Manually Add Channel” function to add in satellite transponders. To get this function:

  1. Click Channels in the left-hand side of the EyeTV software
  2. Then either
    1. Right-click in the channel list and select “Manually Add Channel” or
    2. Select “Manually Add Channel” from the Actions button in the toolbar

Now all you have to do is add in the correct frequency, polarisation and symbol rate settings for each transponder. I’ve done pictures of the settings for the relevant transponders: don’t worry if you can’t change all the settings to match – ‘auto’ should work fine.

BBC3, BB4

BBC3 and BBC4 transponder settings

Channel 4, E4, More4, Film4

E4, More4, Channel 4, Film4 settings

ITV2 and ITV4
ITV2 and ITV4 settings

ITV3

ITV3 settings

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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