Accessing the internet via your satellite dish Forums

skimbo

We plan to spend a lot of time this year in Europe and want to keep in touch with our family using our lap top
We have never used nor understood WiFi? and have always relied on landline to access the internet
We do now have a satellite dish and a Sky digibox What do we have to buy/do to connect the lap top to the satellite (via the dish of course) and open up a connection
We use AOL as our ISP
Any ideas of anyone we can talk to to enable this to be done

Rapide561

Hi

I think you would need a separate dish. Datastorm is one make. I have no idea of cost but recall when I looked into it, £99 per month rings a bell. The equipement was about five grand.

Get a cheap laptop with a wireless thing. Wire less overseas is very common place.

Russell

geraldandannie · Moderator

Yep, Russell's right. TV satellite is essentially a one-way thing - like trying to access the internet through your radio aerial.

There's also the

safariboy

The essential point is that the internet is a two way connection. (unlike TV which you only receive and cannot control) For Sky internet in this country you also have a telephone connection which allows you to send requests to sky HQ. The download from Sky to you is by a dedicated TV channel on which they put a coded reply to your request. Everyone will receive it but only you can decode it. The reason that this works well is that your request for a page is very little information but the Sky TV channel is able to transmit lots of information quickly.
If you want true portability you need a transmitter on your van that can reach the satellite ( about 35 000 km away) and that is bound to be expensive. For local WiFi you only need to reach about 100m at the most and so much lower powers are possible and the cost is small.
The only alternative I can see would be based on the mobile phone system but that is also quite expensive at the moment.

Freetochat

Have a look

rustygun

sugarplum

Hi skimbo

We're down in costa del sol ATM and have been travelling through Portugal and Spain. Firstly all the advice you've been given so far is the best [as usual] and I pay 40 euros a month to delfynet for unlimited roaming wi fi.

Or each campsite has it's own wi fi or cyber cafe that is reasonable to use.

My second point is about your dish and digibox. We had to buy a new/bigger dish and european LNB to receive sky. There are many different opinions on the size of dish required. Also much variation in price.
We did a lot of research and in the end, I think we were lucky in Albufeira we managed to get a local guy who gave us very good advice and sold us a 1.2 mtr dish and high quality 2-way LNB [for sky plus] for 230 euros. This also included 2 high quality scart leads for TV and DVD which improved the picture no end. He told us that Albufeira is on the very edge of the satellite transmission and if it worked here, it would work anywhere else.

When we got to spain we had trouble receiving and got some help. The chap looked at the size of the dish and said we would never get it and we said we had been assured we would. He gave it a try and was amazed it worked and said he had never received in this area on a 1.2 mtr dish.
The secret was the high quality LNB we think.
He charged us 30 euros for setting it up. We didn't mind as we are here for a couple of months.

Hope I'm not being presumptious and that you are probably an expert on the subject, but if not find out all you can before you leave as you can easily get ripped off.

simplesimon

I have looked at this concept for a while and I have to agree with the others that WIFI is the cheapest way to go and the easiest. If you have yet to get your satellite set up then I would suggest looking at the ALDEN NETMASTER. I believe that this system is featured in the issues of Practical Motorhome in their long term test Burstner 747.

Apparently broadband by satellite at touch of a button and not mega money. sounds good to me.

Hope this helps
regards

safariboy

I agree that this looks a better buy but it does cost £3000 for the equipment plus a fee of at least £150 per year. This is probably a reasonable cost but is still expensive if you just want to use e-mail.
I have used Wi-Fi without any up front fee. You can usually buy a short period subscription which is enough for us if long letters home are ready to download.
You need to use web based mail. It is not impossible to use mail programs but the settings can be complicated. The first trip with this system I found difficult but either I or the camp sites seem to have sorted out something and all worked well on the next trip.