Heading North

It was now time to head north and for home and I was keen to find out how far north we'd be able to pick up Astra 2D. Near Portimao we spotted an English motorhome in a service area with an 85cm dish on the roof and in the up position. I had a long chat with Paul(also know as Dollar Yen on the Motorhome Facts website) and compared notes on dish performance. We managed to get all BBC channels, ITV and Channel 4. The 85cm unit - a twin-LNB model with auto skew - wasn't receiving any of these. So the coffee was on us.

To cut a long story short, we lost Channel 4 about 70 miles north of Albufeira but, to my great surprise, we continued to be able to watch BBC & ITV using the Kathrein system until we got close to Coimbra, way past Lisbon. However, when we did the test, it was raining very hard and it was 8.00 in the evening -
not ideal conditions. The next day we were north of Porto and again picked up all ITV channels as well as BBC2 and Film 4, but no BBC 1. We tested again at Vigo, across the border in Spain and this time all we could get was Astra south and various channels on Eurobird. This remained the situation until we got to Gijon on Spain's north coast. The Kathrein system picked up all the 2D channels but we had to switch between the Kathrein and the SKY receivers. By the time we reached San Sebastian, the sat-dome was picking up BBC & ITV and, once we got to Irun on the Spain / France border, the Flat-Sat and Multimo did too.