• Germansky
• Skycards.net

Do note that I post these only because I know of them and have not used them.

If you have used any, please do post and review them - think along the lines of prices (cost per month, per annum over the subscription Sky gets) and how their service is.

Hello All

Here is another sky agent: www.insatinternational.com.
And here's a web site that provides valuable information http://www.astra2d.com/

Altair

can you recommend them? Just for clarity and to add value for others...


and yes, expat's site does have quite a lot of information on it - in its third existence

No, I cannot and would not recommend any of those services unless you have no other choice. They are really expensive for what they provide. It has been mentioned before on your forum that the cheapest solution to watch sky is to bring a box in Switzerland. If there’s no specific need to receive sky, any receiver that is able to decode FTA programs will do the job on astra2d for bbc/itv. GermanSky and Insat act as an intermediary for you and make sky believe that you are in UK. But you have to pay for this. With Insat this will cost you an additional amount of 120 GBP/Year if you pay monthly (or 100 if you decide to pay in advance for one year). For GermanSky I din’t figure out the additional costs.

I'm into my second year with Insat and have found them to be as good as they need to be; ie, they responded quickly when i first joined (sending all the equipment), and later when i've had questions.

Obviously they're not spending GBP 100+ / year looking after my account, but it comes down to money vs what you end up with. I consider it money well spent

(escaping the dodgy Italian soap operas dubbed into Swiss German!)

Having put much effort into the Swisswiki page about "Television Reception", it has recently upset me that someone modified this page (see here) removing certain Sky agents and inserting "Astrosat"

This type of anti-competitive behaviour surely is not right so I would urge anyone considering using their service to search and read reports like in this thread and this thread.

The Swisswiki page has been "fixed" and Per is aware of this abuse of that community project.

Had Astrosat simply added themselves, I would not have been prompted to investigate them and their service - and I would not have seen it fit to warn anyone considering their service to dig a little.

After receiving notification via e-mail from one of the readers of this forum we are shocked to discover this posting.

It has recently come to our attention at Astrosat.info that some person(s) or Business(es) have begun spamming forums similar to this, including this one, using our Trade Name (Astrosat) with apparent intent to cause the resultant defamation of our Trade Name. This cannot and will not be tollerated.

We want to make it very clear that the business in Cyprus, according to the two posts in your links, have been using our Trade Name (Astrosat) to supply and fit satellite dishes, are not in any way, shape or form, affiliated or related to us.

We are based in Germany and have been in business since 1996 serving the mainly UK/US/English speaking expatriate community. We are commited to customer service and have many satisfied customers throughout Europe and have helped very many expatriates, with free valuable information and guidance regarding the reception of the free BBC channels, including advice on the dish size required for their particular location. In our years in business we have seen imposters come and go. Yes imposters who even copy our wording and include it on their websites without taking out the astrosat links!

Whilst we can understand your sentiments Lee, any further libelous defamation, including the remark that you hid (by using the same ink colour as the page background) at the bottom of your post (now bold and pink for all to see) will not be tollerated and legal action will be taken.

This matter has been placed into the hands of our solicitors and we ask that any information regarding the culprits behind the spamming be sent to us via our e-mail address: info@astrosat.info

Gottfried Ulderberg
[mod edit: links removed]

Gottfriend

Looks like you're confusing libel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libel) with opinion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion) based upon the fact that Sandman edited a wiki entry and removed links to competitors of your company.

Are you saying that Sandman has nothing to do with Astrosat? Because he seems to have an email address (gould) at where you used to hold your domain (planet-interkom) and was posting from a similar IP address to the one you're using now (so same ISP, at least).

Dear Gottfried,

This is indeed very interesting. You are right that Lee's white text hidden at the bottom of his message was unfair. I've edited it to remove it. I've also edited your post to remove the excessive whitespace and to remove the links you had promoting your business. I did however leave in your quote of the offending words, which you highlighted for emphasis. It was your choice to repeat them, so I've left them there (google does like highlighted words doesn't it?).

Now I feel I need to point something out here. If there are some people in cyprus pretending to be assosciated with you, and this is being discussed on another forum, it has nothing to do with us. I suggest you take that up with the forums concerned.

I am however very interested in the points raised by Lee. Your post seems to attempt to refute them, crying foul that someone else is setting you up. You are upset by this thread and feel that it is somehow unfair to your company. So then I presume you claim complete innocence for defacing the swisswiki page and then attempting to spam this thread (this post has been removed in case people are wondering where it is).

So let's go over the facts here. As Lee pointed out, someone removed other company's links and inserted (astrosat.info) onto the Swisswiki. No, not some company from Cyprus - the link pointed to YOUR website. Now according to Swisswiki the IP address used by the user "Sandman" to make that edit was 88.107.152.xx (last digit changed to protect the guilty).

Shortly thereafter Sandman appeared on this site saying how great your company was. He used exactly the same IP address. Pretty damning wouldn't you say?

But no doubt you will claim that Sandman is setting you up. I doubt it. He was promoting your company, and he thought he would get away it. But wait - it gets better.

Your post came from 88.107.128.xx - DNS resolves both your IP address and the address of Sandman to the same domain - dynamic.dsl.as9105.com - a range which belongs to Tiscali.

Now that's quite a coincidence isn't it? If sandman really was trying to set you up by saying nice things about you and putting your address about the place, then it seems odd that your IP addresses are quite close together isn't it? I mean, really, what are the chances of that?

Now of course - someone ELSE could come along and complain that you don't represent astrosat. Except that the email address you supplied comes from that domain, and you have to verify it in order to post. That's pretty good evidence for me that you are who you say you are.

It would seem to be that you are digging yourself a rather large hole and making yourself look rather silly. Not only that, but you are digging this hole on a thread that ranks rather well on google. Are you trying to make life more difficult for yourself?

Therefore I would say this to you - keep your talk of solicitors where it belongs, and instead try to think about the impression you are creating about you and your company. Nobody here has defamed you, it can't be defamation if it's true, and from where I sit the evidence doesn't way in your favour.

If you had contacted us about this matter privately, and apologised for this behaviour we may have just removed the posts and left it at that. But since you chose to try to defend this in public, that's where it will stay.

Apologies to other readers who feel that this is getting off topic - you would be correct. But it least it may help some of you with your decision about which company to use.

If you need Sky digital, then do yourself a favour and go to www.insatinternational.com . Just look at the testimonials on their site, and more importantly search forums with very positive comments from satisfied customers. I had my Sky HD from them when STBs were like gold dust. Currently you can get them for around £300 including UPS to Switzerland. I believe they are the genuine article.


Admin-added disclaimer:

I quote you because....I assume you work for Insat and thus negates your "positive" feedback on their services somewhat. And you're located in London so are unlikely to be using them.

So -1 to Insat because of that.

Hi all,

just joined, but have been "lurking" for a while.

I have been doing some research as to where to buy a viewing card and subscription from. I checked out all the usual suspects, germansky.com, skytvcard.com and so on.

What put me off was the recurring handling/agency/whatever fee they were charging. 100-200 Euro/year seemed a bit steep for what they actually do.

Eventually I stumbled across 2 suppliers which seemed to be more reasonable.
1. skydigitalcards.com, which charge only a one time fee of €100. They will manage your subscription no matter how long you continue subscribing to Sky. The supply ROI Sky Cards.

2. discountskytv.com, which charge a recurring fee, but at a reasonable €39/year. They supply UK and ROI Sky Cards

I checked for feedback on both of them on digitalspy.co.uk and forum.digitalfernsehen.de. Didn't find too much, but at least nobody seemed to have been ripped off ;-)

I mailed both of them with a set of questions I had and ended up ordering from discountskytv.com. Initially I was leaning towards the first, because of the one time fee, but the second answered my mails exhaustively and they agreed to courier me the card for an extra fee even activating it for me to make sure I wouldn't miss the weekend (I ordered on a thursday). Plus the first year fee of €40 (card included) seemed to be a small risk to take.

As I already had a Freesat card, I decided to get the ROI viewing card, which gave me the added benefit of Channel 6, while still beeing able to get Channel 4 and five through my Freesat card.

HTH,
Alex

P.S. I am in no way affiliated with any of the suppliers I mentioned. But since I got lots of info from this forum, I though I'd share my experiences.

Cheers Alex, a nice balanced first post on this topic (unlike some others).

I was also chasing for the cheapest options. Some of the really hyped up ones like satone, insatinternational, sat europe etc. etc. seem to be charging extremely high amounts. I chanced upon this site called smart2check.com which seem to be charging one of the lower amounts. Their digiboxes are on the higher side but their sky monthly deals seem to be much better (at I think some 50 pounds one time fees), which seems to be one of the much better prices after seeing all the 100 plus prices around. I have not tried it myself but just came across this site, so thought will share with people.

Hello Alex
Glad to hear you got sorted out, please excuse my intrusion to your discussions, I'm just looking up some search results for my site. and felt I just had to correct your post, to simple state that we no longer charge for Viewing cards at all.

Regards
Marty

I guess Marty is referring to skydigitalcards.com. Just happened to visit their site and it seems it is true! You will need to get a user name and password and register in the site. Rest seems the payment is converted to Euros instead of pounds (since its ROI card).

But please note these are Republic of Ireland cards and there are some offers running on them (i guess the offer closes May 8th). As Marty has pointed out on his website, you need to indicate that you don't want to continue on the offer after the first two months, else you will be charged for the sports and movies after a couple of months (sports and movies are free for first couple of months)

The most important part of course is that you get some 4 free Irish channels and you WILL NOT get the free tv channels that generally come with the freesat card. (those additional 3-4 channels that have been talked about enough). So you will need a separate freesat card if you want to go for that. I guess with the money you save from the free subscription you can always go in for a second hand freesat card.

hello, it is ok to get sky with the correct dish in Switzerland, I sell the yellow house viewing cards which give a massive amount of channels to most of Europe sometimes with boxes and they work ok as long as you use a Uk address or telephone if you ever have to contact Sky in the future

the yellow house viewing cards open up three channels and make BBC1 and ITV1 regionalised.

the yellow house viewing cards with a subscription opens up more, that's for sure.

Just so that people know, the Republic of Ireland card currently on offer from skydigitalcards seems to be one good offer running currently for the moment

(a) You get 2 months of free Sky sports and movies, specially useful in case you want to try out whether you have enough time or enthu to watch any of those premium channels and hence, whether its worth going in for those after two months by shelling out the difference.
(b) As long as you are going in for a subscription, I don't think you will miss Five, Five US or Five Life much since most of the programs are anyways shown on one of the Variety Mix channels or even the TGE channels.Channel 4 is part of the deal.
(c) With the money saved on shelling out for the card, you can go in for a freesat card anyday you decide to cancel the Sky subscription. Even postage it seems is free.

Admin - There are two sockets I find for inserting cards in the 2600 or DS430N box. Is it for use with two different cards (like a Freesat card that i may buy separately) or I can use only one for inserting a card, the other is for some home banking or something else as was mentioned in one of the earlier posts?

one is a viewing card slot and the other is an interactive slot with nothing presently supplied for use in there.