First thing you'll notice about the Vantage HD-8000S is that no hard drive is supplied.

But rather than relying on external storage, the HD8000S flagship accepts an internal SATA (Serial ATA) drive. We successfully tried a 750GB model, but we've been told that 1TB drives will also work.

The other key addition, twin tuners apart, is hardware blind search – which is superior to the software-driven equivalent of the 7100S.

Solid build

In most respects the HD8000S is a dead ringer for its smaller brother. The styling is a case in point.

We're impressed with the glossy piano-black finish, informative 13-character fluorescent display and plenty of blue (rather than red) illumination. Behind the swing-down front-panel, you'll find a USB 2.0 socket, two CI and two card slots capable of emulating various CAMs.

The receiver's control buttons – standby, menu-access, volume and channel- change – can be operated whether the front panel is up or down.

The remote is solidly built and its buttons have a positively tactile feel. Learning from its mistakes of the past, Vantage has 'coloured in' the four buttons (known as the 'fast-text' buttons, for historical reasons) that are frequently used for sub-menu access and other functions.

Dual USBs

Each tuner has independent LNB inputs and outputs; these could be fed from a dual-LNB or separate dishes. An alternative is to 'loop' the output from one tuner to the input of the second, although this decreases flexibility (you're stuck with one satellite and channels of the same polarity).

There are two rear-panel USB 2.0 ports. One is for external HDDs, while the other allows the HD8000S's internal hard drive to be seen by a PC. Transfers via the latter would be considerably faster than using the Ethernet port, although the PC needs to be in the same room as the receiver.

You can also back up and restore channel databases to and from USB storage devices, which is helpful when upgrading firmware. The HDMI port and component ports are complemented by Scarts for TV and VCR, plus composite/S-video outputs and analogue/digital audio outputs.

Thankfully, HDMI and standard-def Scart video can be output simultaneously.

Speedy setup

Turn on the receiver for the first time and a series of wizards take you through language, tuner setting (independent dishes/looped-through/dual-LNB) and scanning. The latter is fine if you're using fixed dishes, but if you have a freshly installed motorised system additional setup is required.

And so to the main menus. Borrowed from the 7100S, the menu that configures DiSEqC (1.3/USALS and 1.2 mounts and positioners are supported, in addition to 1.0/1.1 'switchboxes') seems less than intuitive at first. But you'll soon realise its potential and find that sequentially finding and storing satellites is quite fast.

You'll find it in the 'installation' menu, where you'll configure your LNB/dish settings and scan for channels – manually, automatically or 'blindly'. Up to 20,000 channels can be stored.

Channel scanning

For auto-scanning you can specify all or just FTA channels – network searches are also permitted. A wide variety of C and Ku-band transponders are pre- programmed into the receiver's internal database.

If you choose manual searching entry of frequency/polarity/symbol rate is possible, as is the ability to specify PIDs. Less than intuitively, the latter has to be selected from the manual search's 'scan mode' option.