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Elgato EyeTV 310 HD satellite TV tuner

Watch Freesat HD on your Mac

It turns out that there’s quite a lot of hardware floating around up there in space, so in order to pick up satellite broadcasts you first need to enter the name and orbital position of a specific satellite into the EyeTV software. By default, the EyeTV software locked onto the European Astra satellite at 19.20 East. We had to explore the program’s menu options before we discovered a more extensive list of satellites that we could choose from.

Elgato EyeTV 310

First, find your satellite...

However, this list merely provides the names of the various satellites and doesn’t give any indication of the channels broadcast from them. So we then had to root around on the Freesat website before we found the information we needed, which is that Freesat is broadcast through the Astra 2 satellite at 28.20 East, and the delightfully-named Eurobird at 28.50 East.

Satellite TV buffs will know all this, of course, but first-time users who aren’t familiar with the details of satellite broadcasting systems could easily get lost here, so Elgato could perhaps provide a bit more information about some of the more important satellite services, such as Freesat.

Once we had specified the correct satellite it took the EyeTV software another 20 minutes or so to tune into the full selection of channels – but that’s because there are more than 1000 TV channels and radio stations broadcast from the Astra 2 satellite. Unfortunately, many of the best channels are encrypted pay-TV channels broadcast by Sky – which also uses the Astra 2 satellite – and only available to Sky subscribers. The EyeTV 310 does have a CI (Common Interface) slot that allows you to insert pre-paid cards that provide access to certain pay-TV services, but that’s not a particularly attractive option given the already high cost of the device.

To make things a bit simpler here, the EyeTV software does have a useful option that lets you hide pay-TV channels from view, so that you can just focus on the free channels that are available. It wasn’t long before we were sampling the delights of the equestrian Horse & Country, the Body In Balance yoga channel and The Dating Channel - purely in the interests of research, of course.

Elgato EyeTV 310

Watch BBC HD in all its glory... and gameshows for kids

Admittedly, there aren’t many exciting channels currently available on Freesat that you can’t also get from the terrestrial Freeview system - and a much cheaper Freeview TV tuner - but there is one particular channel that we were very keen to get a look at.

Next page: Verdict

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