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Viewers in Switzerland and France already have access to a considerable selection of BBC, ITV and other channels on a free-to-air basis. Channel Five, or Five as we must call it these days, started transmitting in the clear on Monday, November 3, 2008. At the moment, we have to assume that it’s only a test because it’s nestled into one of the transponders used by the BBC. But at least it's now finally up and running with a whole new array of programming ranging from House to Rupert Bear accessible.

If you have a free-to-air satellite receiver, you need to do a manual search on the transponder whose frequency is 10773, polarity is Horizontal and Symbol Rate is 22000. If your receiver already gets BBC2, then this transponder already exists and you won’t have to create a new one. When you do the search, the receiver will ‘find’ the BBC channels and there will be one channel tagged as ‘6335’ … that will be Five.

If you have a Sky Digibox, you have to add Five using the ‘Other Channels’ method. Using your Sky Digibox remote control, press Services, then select ‘Add Channels’. In the Add Channels screen, change the frequency to 10773, change the Polarisation to H, change the Symbol Rate to 22.0 and change the FEC to 5/6. Highlight ‘Find Channels’ and press Select.

The digibox will then display a list of channels that it found and you should see ‘6335’ in the list. Highlight this and press the Yellow Button to tick the channel. Press Select twice and then the Sky button to quit the menu. That channel is now stored as an ‘Other Channel’ so just press Services and select Other Channels.

It’s quite likely that there will be some frequency changes this month until Five finally settles down in its new position. If you have freesat (as opposed to free-to-air) then Five will be added to slot number 105 automatically. In the meantime, you can watch Five by adding the channel to your receiver in Non-Freesat mode. The procedure is explained on our website www.bigdishsat.com under the heading: adding channels.

A new High Definition Freesat receiver has come out, the Bush HD receiver. Granted, it’s not as sophisticated as the Humax Foxsat and it doesn’t have the Humax’s full colour menu system, but it’s a very economical way (169 euros) of watching BBC and ITV in High Definition. Obviously, you will need an HD-Ready or full HD television to get the full benefit of these HD satellite receivers.

Freesat receivers use the same satellite as Sky, so if you have a Sky box and want to replace it with a Freesat receiver, you don’t have to modify your satellite dish. More details are available on the Bigdishsat site under the heading: freesat HD

John Sidwell, a satellite television specialist, runs Bigdishsat (www.bigdishsat.com ), a French-registered company supplying satellite equipment aimed at the British and European community in France and Switzerland.