Sky HD is available in Spain (assuming you can get a good Sky signal) but there are no immediate plans to make HD available on Spanish TDT.

i am in gandia so you are just up the road....not too sure if i can give contact details as it would be classed as advertising, but either PM me or see my profile for the website and contact details and i will see what i can do for you.

sent you an email

The guy who runs the Costablanca Expats forum has had Sky HD since the launch 18 months ago.

As far as Spanish TDT, they don't even do widescreen yet, not since the last time I looked, so HD will be a long time coming!!

I was told that the signal wasn't good enough for HD in many areas of Spain, although I'm rapidly beginning to lose faith in the person who told me that

It should work anywhere you get a standard signal if your suffering from drop outs then you might want to get this rectified, the only thing that different is the bit rate of transmission and of course the definition so hd tv needed. Better to have a telly that true HD which takes a 1080p signal as apposed to one thats HD ready and will only take a 1080i signal. and i may be wrong but i think you need the twin lnb for HD service.

Proibably find if you upgrade to HD with SKY they'll tell you that you must connect your phone to a line

Not if you buy your own box then get some one in the uk to call on your behalf to upgrade service. also then your not tied to it.

looking at he list of HD channels at the moment...
BBC HD is on the same frequency as BBC Channel Islands...so if you get CI you will get the HD

The only other ones you may stuggle with are Discovery HD and Sky Arts...these would drop out during the late afternoon and return early evening....use Channel 4 as a measure for these channels.

All the others are on the South beams which are OK to recieve here in Spain.

But as mentioned before we do not know yet where Channel 4 and ITV will stick their HD services...

SatandPCguy can you explain about signal dropout?

I know a relative amount of info on sat systems but have never been able to understand the loss of transmission on some channels.

As I see it the sats are in a geo-stationary orbit so the signal is always being beamed down to the same footprint, so why should the signal dissapear at certain times? There has to be an explanation but I have never come across it.

Because of the very slightly inclined orbital position to the equator, a geostationary satellite will always appear from earth to be moving in a very small, thin figure-of-eight pattern over the course of one rotation (an earth day).

This doesn't affect anyone inside the footprint, but does affect people on the outside of the fringes where the slight daily movement is enough to knock you over the edge.

See, I'm full of useless information

My understanding from my military Transmission days is that mid afternoon is the suns peak point thus a lot of alpha waves are ionizing in the upper atmosphere creating a mirror affect. this is why also mid afternoon short wave length transmission travel further as they start bouncing off the upper atmosphere in a better fashion. Geostationary means geostationy some off the transmissions off sats are so tight that if it moved you would never be able to get it unless you moved with it.

I only know what the head of Meteosat's technical department told me about 15 years ago. He could have been making it up, of course, but I doubt it!

Yeh the ceo of British Telecom said you can have broadband everywhere..

So if it's the sun, why do some people lose transmission in the evening? Anyway, all satellites normally drift in a cube 100 miles wide, whilst travelling at just under 7,000 miles per hour. That doesn't sound like 'stationary' to me.