Advice please

Has anyone advice to give to one holiday homeowner  that has fallen foul of the new digital switch over----only programme we can receive now is the Disney channel !!! --great for our kids, everything else is in Spanish--I do miss the news!!

We are a ground floor apartment so to get Sky  would need to run wires down other peoples apartment walls and as we do not see them and  they  do not attend Community meetings this is a nigh on impossible task! We were out for a long weekend and did not see anyone in our block. As far as we could seen no other ground floor apartment had wires leading them either. 

Surely we cannot be the only ones in Spain in this dilemna---

Any suggestions greatfully received  thank you

I would suggest asking the President or Administrator.

Normally apartment blocks have rules as to where dishes can be sited. Sometimes there is central ducting running up to common areas on the roof through which airconditiong pipes run etc.

Newer building like to control things like a/c units and sat dishes as they can make building look nasty.

But also if you are groundfloor and have a garden then you could site your dish there. Dishes unlike ariels do not need height but only a clear view of the satellite in orbit.

of course you could always just buy a basic tdt receiver (EUR20 to EUR50) from worten or el corte ingles or any other shop selling TVs and you should get most of the channels you had before and some of those channels also have a language option.

Depends whether you want to see the soaps or not!

Hi JHW

When our Community first started some people paid to have satellite TV installed but it ended up with people connecting to other people's dish without permission of the owner.  This resulted in the owner of the dish wanting to put an extra cable to his apartment but was unable to do so without unplugging another apartment.  Our President put it to the Community a proposal for a Community system.  This was voted on and agreed.  We now have five dishes that serve 30 apartments.  Each apartment can then have 2 connections to the system.  We have Freesat and not Sky.  You get all the usual channels and many more.  You can buy a Freesat box in the UK for around £50, cheaper than in Spain.  Infact, during the bad weather our Freesat box worked when some neighbours Sky boxes could not find a signal and these were connected to the same dish as us.  With regards the cabling you cannot run it down the outside of the building.  This is against the law.  It sounds like you are in apartment complex.   When these are built, like ours, the builders put trunking in for cables from the roof area.  Ours runs from the lift machinary room all the way to the bottom.  It is fed from the dish via a splitter down the trunking and into our apartment.  The only visible cable is where it comes out of the wall into the satellite box.  If there are a number of UK owners this may be the best option.  If not ask permission of your President to have a dish installed.  Whoever installs the system will need access to the machinary room and the keys will be held by the President or the man that does the maintainance for your Community.  I hope this helps to solve your problem. 

If you have been switched to digital, you can get the TDT (Spanish version of Freeview) which should give you quite a few channels depending on where you are.  A TDT box from Carrefour or Media Markt etc will cost from around 40 to 100 euros depending on type/make etc.  We get over 30 channels of which at least 12 have the option of switching to English if the original programme was in English.  OK, we don't get the soaps but do get an option to watch something in English.  Plus there are about 6 kids channels (including Disney) which are virtually all English.  Sony TV is all English throughout the day and usually has things like Flipper, DSV9 and others to about 6 then American comedies followed by something like CSI or NCIS.  Canal 9 has some films on during the early evening and a few other programmes (sometimes a French film but, obviously, original language is also French).  

Most modern TVs have the freeview option built in as a tuner and we find ours from UK works perfectly on the Spanish system with no need to get an extra box.  (Some might tell you that UK TVs don't have channel 69 which the Spanish use but ours does by simply changing the country to Spain and this TV is about 5 years old).  You also have the added plus that Spanish sports shows English premier league matches (with Spanish commentary) as well.  In addition, it picks up 20 or so digital radio channels (none in English, though).

Just check your TDT box has a language option so you an select the original language (even a 29 euro one I bought a couple of years has that option but the signal on that is very poor compared to my built in one).

Would have thought that if the OP was getting Spansih Disney channel then they are already getting Spanish Digital TV - as it was not available on analogue, and is only available for free on digital....in which case switch off would not have affected the OP as they are already getting digital channels....

(of course depends on how their community system is set up!)