When I first became interested in satellite TV nearly 20 years ago, it was definitely a rich man's hobby. Even an ultra-basic system comprising a rotary-tuned analogue receiver with mono sound, noisy LNB and 90cm dish sold for £500.
In this pre-digital era, few channels were available and that small dish (1.2m was the general recommendation) meant that results were somewhat variable. Now hundreds of digital channels are available from just one orbital position, and hardware has never been cheaper.
We live in an era where you can buy a DVD player for not much more than the price of one full-price DVD, thanks to the industrious Chinese electronics industry and its vast economies of scale.
With this in mind, we shouldn't really be surprised that a complete satellite system - based on a budget Far-Eastern receiver - can be assembled for such a small amount of money. And although the receiver is hardly enthusiast-grade, it's not a toy; you wouldn't expect one from a respected brand like Technisat.
The Telestar StarSat 1 receiver may store 4,000 channels only, but that should be more than enough for an FTA-only box.
Even this capacity will suffice for several popular satellites - this system may not be motorised but, thanks to its DiSEqC 1.2 and USALS capacity, the opportunity to upgrade is always there. There's even an optical digital audio output, which is most unexpected at this level.
The dish is 80cm in size, and the supplied 'SkySingle 40' single-output wideband LNB - which has a claimed noise figure of 0.6dB - should be sufficient to pull in all of the most important satellites that can be received in Europe.
An 80cm dish lends itself to motorisation; hopefully, Technisat will source a cheap DiSEqC mount for use with it. Some comprehensive self-install instructions (perhaps published on a website to keep costs down) would enable DIY enthusiasts to put it all together and enjoy the fascinating televisual choice that is available from the skies. The cheapest mount I could find sells for £60, in other words, £10 less than the entire system reviewed here.
A tiny box that's less than 140mm deep, the StarSat 1 certainly won't win any awards for fancy styling. But in practical terms it fares better. Most obviously, there's a four-digit green LED display for indicating channel number. Great, then, for radio-only listening - as is the aforementioned rear-mounted optical digital audio output.
