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.

Front panel controls are restricted to channel up/down and standby; the utilitarian handset is a must. Around the back, there's no UHF modulator, so a TV with Scart is essential. Telestar has endowed the StarSat 1 with a RS232 serial port for upgrades, although one upgrade that's certainly not possible is a path to conditional-access - the StarSat 1 is resolutely a FTA-only receiver.

A peek inside reveals acceptable build quality, and some good-quality components, including the familiar STi5518 'jungle-chip' DVB/MPEG-2 decoder, an ALPS tuner and a Burr-Brown audio DAC. Components like this can be found in vastly more expensive receivers.

Setup and searching

The main menu is split into five main sections, including a 'channel-manager' (for listing/renaming/locking/moving channels or managing six 'favourites' lists - three TV, and three radio), 'receiver information' (hardware and firmware versions) and timer (10 events, over a year).

Perhaps the most important one, though, is 'user installation'. In here are all of the functions involved with setting up the receiver - dish/LNB/DiSEqC setup, channel- searching, system (languages, aspect ratio, video output/ standard and LNB power), over-the-air firmware and database updates (these are carried via Astra 1, although none was available when I tried), parental locks and the ability to load factory-default settings.

From the channel-search menu, you can choose the satellite to be searched and specify a network scan, one or all transponders. The coloured buttons bring up pertinent submenus (a theme that's common throughout the StarSat 1's user interface).

In channel search, for example, pressing the red button will let you edit transponder details like frequency, polarisation and symbol rate. Press the green button, and manual PID entry is on the cards - the yellow button, meanwhile, presents you with the opportunity to rename the satellite.

Those folk with DiSEqC can move their dishes and store satellite positions - other available multi- sat options (which have to be changed from 'antenna setup') include Skywire, Unicable and DiSEqC 1.0 switchboxes.

Signal-strength and quality bar graphs pertaining to a user-selectable transponder on that satellite are displayed as a positioning aid. If you're using a USALS dish mount, site latitude and longitude can be entered for automatic determination of satellite positions - a 'go-to' function will let you enter the orbital position of the bird you're after. There's also a 'resync' function that will apply the same correction to all satellite positions.