This may very well be a stupid question but...

If I have a satellite dish with a double LNB, can I have a Sky box attached to one and a freesat box to the other? i.e. is the dish alignment the same for both services? Plus, if I bought a freesat box in the UK would it work in Spain? I'm presuming that like sky boxes, it would.

Sky and Freesat use the same satellites.
In fact, for just about all the channels that are on both services, they use the same frequencies.
There is no seperate "Sky" and "freesat" satellite.

A sky box with no viewing card gets (just about) the same channels as a Freesat box.

A Sky box, with a freesatfromsky (non subscription) card get a few more channels : stronger ITV1 regions, Five, Five HD, Fiver, F*, Pick TV, Sony TV, Motors TV, Viva TV, Liverpool FC TV.

For example, depending on your location in Spain, on Freesat you may not get C4 or Five 24/7, but with a sky box and a Sky card you can get these on a small 80 cm dish.

To see what your receptin of channels will be like using a Freesat box, simply take your Sky viewing card out of your sky box, the channels you are then left with will be the ones you get on Freesat.

Note that if you want to use a PVR / PErsonal Video Recorder, like Sky+ or Freesat+ then those receivers ideally need 2 cables from the LNB...so you may need to go for a 4 output LMB (ie 2 for the PVR and 1 for the nonPVR box)

Most helpful, thanks.

I have sky downstairs and freesat upstairs.

I do however wish I had purchased an additional skybox as although there are lots of channels listed (pretty much the same as on Sky) I cannot get them. When I select them it just says 'new service please wait...'

Also BBC news recenely went offline so all I have is Al Jazera and a few European ones.

So with hindsight I would have opted for SKY freeview as you have more choice of channels