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Once again, Essential Edge contributor John Sidwell highlights some new satellite products and broadcast pointers, such as how to receive onstream sports events such as the just finished Olympics for free. There are also some new features dealing with security cameras for your home.

Mouriol Milhaguet, France -- The first product is a new Freesat Plus satellite receiver called the Sagem DTR94 and it comes complete with a built in hard disc drive of 500Gb which will allow you to record up to 250 hours of programmes. It has two tuners so that you can watch one channel while you record another and it will also record two programmes at the same time. This new box is being launched at 299 euros and it has a twelve months manufacturer's guarantee.

The second product is a bit of a departure for a satellite installer. It’s a home surveillance system consisting of four-colour cameras and a 500 Gb digital video recorder (DVR). It's something that I installed recently here in France for my own business but it has many home applications like watching over the pool or the main drive. You can also see what's eating the lettuces at night in your garden.

The cameras can be used in daytime and in pitched darkness thanks to the built-in infra red light. It can be mounted indoors or outside. The DVR has a built in 500 Gb hard disc drive and you can set it to record just from the one camera or all four. You can also programme the DVR just to record when a movement has been detected or just at certain hours of the day. This uses H264 compression techniques and it connects directly to a computer monitor screen or to a television set.

The DVR is networkable so you can connect it to your home computer network and view the cameras from any computer connected to that network. You can also access this system from the internet so you can watch your house in France being burgled from the comfort of your living room. Theres's more information on this system on the Bigdishsat website.

Freesat News

The American business and news channel, CNBC, has just joined the freesat line up at channel 210. Also, freesat now has its own information programme on channel 999.

Red Button

If you have a Sky Digibox or a Freesat box, then you will know that you have a Red Button to access digital services when (for example) major sports events are being staged. It's in very good use at the moment with all that's going on at the Winter Olympics and the Six Nations rugby. However, if you have a free to air receiver, you will know that there is no Red Button ... but there is a way of getting to see extra sports events.

These events are actually being transmitted on the Astra 2 satellite and your free to air box can easily be programmed to receive them. It's just like adding a new channel to your box except, in this case, the channels are called streams. You will need to know the Frequency, Polarity and Symbol Rate and then enter this information into your free to air box so that it can do a Manual Search. Manual Search is important because if you do an Automatic Search, you will end up with hundreds of unwanted channels.

To see the extra coverage from the Olympics, for example, you would have to check out the following:

Frequency = 12441

Polarity = Vertical Symbol Rate = 27500

There's problem help on the Bigdishsat website for the free to air receivers that we've supplied over the years.

John Sidwell is based in Southwestern France and runs his own company, www.bigdishsat.com