Ive heard from a friend that British Skye will no longer be availible in Europe after June/ july 13, i presume that they are putting another sattelite up to stop us picking up the signal,has anybody else heard about this.

Hello and welcome.

Please read through the last pages of this thread (in the link) for up to date info on Sky in Italy using a UK box. It might help you.

http://britishexpats.com/forum/showthread.php?t=405375

Thanks for the thread. ive had Sky in Sardinia for 3 years using a 1.8 dish, sky box and my card and had no problems except during very bad weather.
The point is that something is going to change and we will no longer get sky.
This statement came via a friend of a friend who is a very clever electronic engineer and knows all there is to know about sattelites, im in the uk at the moment so tomm i will e-mail him for more information.

There are other kinds of electronic engineers?????

I do not think anyone can tell you for sure about Sky, it is all guessing at the moment, but I doubt Sky will allow themselves to lose milion of subscriptions from Europe.

E-MAIL FROM MY TECHNICAL FRIEND.
Sky are changing at least all the free channels over to two new satellites, one is already up there testing, the other is due for launch in May and will be operational by mid June. These new satellites have been specially designed with a very narrow beam aimed solely at the UK and the cut off at the edge of the beam is so precise that it is unlikely that even with a very large dish, anyone outside the UK would be able to receive signals. This has been forced upon free channels by the european parliament as they want to protect performance rights across europe,channel 5 has already gone to the new satellite and is testing, we cant get it now.
This may mean that if you are paying for Sky in the uk you might still be able to receive some channels. I will look into this a bit further.

If you realign your dish you can get channel 5 however you lose everything else , we have tried this and it is so. We live in central italy. I just hope when the change happens we can still get most of the channels or we will cancel our sky subscription along with thousands of other people.

I'm with Isakat on this one, I cannot see Sky moving their channels to the narrow beam. They'll lose too much money from expats. Besides, their channels are encrypted so there isn't the same issue with the rights. So I think it will be the freeview channels most likely to be affected.

You could all get bigger dishes but it's better to wait until everything settles. It's all behind schedule because the transfer over to the new satellite was expected to have been completed before Xmas.

As mentioned in another post above, summer time is now the next best estimate.

I don't know about realigning the dish? The location of the new satellites are the same as the old, i.e. 28.2E but definitely fine tuning it or adjusting the skew on the LNB can reap rewards and improve your signal reception. As can changing the LNB to a high quality one like an Invacom Black Ultra.

Anyway Channel 5 is shite (fingers crossed LFC qualifies for the Champions League thereby avoiding the dreaded C5 Thursday night football slot).

Just back from Sardinia where we have now lost channel 5, expect more channels to go about June/July as the satellite is now being tested.