For anyone else's benefit I found a really useful piece of free software whilst struggling with my dish alignment at
http://www.al-soft.com/saa/satinfo.shtml
You input your dish vert and horiz dimensions, home location, select the satellite you want and it tells you the exact elevation of the actual dish face, having calculated the LNB offset angle for you, so setting up is much less guess work. A simple protractor, piecie of wood and a spirit level does the vertical setup really accurately. Much more accurate than the engravings on the bracket.

Thats awesome! Thank you very much for this

Or you could go to http://www.dishpointer.com/
Does pretty much the same thing, if you're a little paranoid about installing free software on your PC.

Thanks PaddyG.
This is even easier to use
What sats do you capture to receive english tv? I'm thinking: 13.0E Hot Bird 6, 8, 9
Do you also pay for encryption? if so where do you get this?
I see that you can dl the keys almost everywhere.
Im using a pc with mythtv0.22, linux. just got it working last week.
My dish should come today

Glad it helped, even though the dish pointer site is easier.
One thing I found useful with the free software I recommended is the sun's azimuth calculator.
Sounds daft, but compasses can be tricky, as some of the dish parts are magnetic, or your balcony rails, or even the floor. But by checking at what time the sun is exactly at the right horizontal compass bearing for the satellite you need, and setting the face of the dish at the right vertical angle, I hit the satellite first time every time.

Unfortunately it only happens once a day! (Oh and you have to get the GMT, local time calculation right too for this technique. The simple check is to see what time the calculator shows as dawn and dusk (green zone) to make sure you are not 1 hour out)

And then put a piece of tape on the balcony rail on that line for future resetting.

Th Astra cluster broadcast Sky and terestrial British Tv.