Having put my rather unhappy thoughts about the BBC Sky F1 TV deal down on paper a few days ago, I thought there has to be another (cheaper) way.
Now I am no techie but my investigations did highlight some interesting stuff.
My attention was first drawn to this article in the Daily Telegraph
Okay, so why not use a foreign decoder in the UK to receive all F1 live races?
First, we know that you will be able to listen to every race live via BBC Radio 5Live so it’s live TV that’s tricky.
How about watching the German channel RTL which has the contract to show all F1 races (and qualifying) live until 2015? Just mute the German commentary and listen to 5Live?
From what I see, RTL can be received relatively easily in the UK. A 60cm dish in the south and a 80cm dish in the north would suffice.
Complete systems can be bought from a number of sources: I list just a few: cdtronix, ebay, aerialshack and argos (not sure about the dish size though at argos).
Some systems come with a satellite finder meter. If not there are iphone and android apps for this. There is also dishpointer
For those of a technical bent RTL is on Astra 1 at 19.2 degrees East (this is different to UK satellites)
I could not find anything to say it’s illegal to do this.
intentsgp
