The End of the Road

Having tested the satellite equipment all down Spain's east coast and seen what over-development and mass tourism have done to the Costas, we decided to go as far to the south-east as possible and just keep going until we ran out of road. We aimed for San Jose, south-east of Almeria and with a road in but no road out. The coast road led us through some rugged coastal areas and past shepherds tending their flocks - how seasonal we thought - and also very typical of how Spain used to look twenty and more years ago. We ended up in a parking area just a couple of hundred yards from a beautiful and completely unspoiled beach and we're still there now, transmitting this via the Alden Netmaster.


Even here, where you would expect to have to use a 2M dish to get reliable TV reception, by using the Slingbox at home in London and accessing it via the Internet, we can watch every channel that we can get on Freeview at home. There's no digibox, no card and no subscription; just a laptop computer. And, of course, we can talk to friends and relatives via Skype for around a penny a minute or, if they have Skype, for nothing.


If we want to watch TV via the "traditional" satellite route, we just press a button to point the Netmaster at the Astra 2 satellites (or Astra 1 or Hotbird if we're feeling adventurous) and we can get all the channels that we would expect to get. Unfortunately, that doesn't include any BBC or ITV channels or Channel 4 but does, surprisingly, include Channel 5 (of which more later) and its associated channels, US & Life.
As for conventional satellite TV, as was the case further up the coast, a smaller dish such as a Multimo or a sat-dome will pick up almost as many channels as any dish under 1.5M. There will be some channels missing such as The Wine Channel and Scuzz but frankly, for most people, this won't be much of a loss. We're going to head west now towards Malaga and Gibraltar and find out what's available to British TV viewers around there.