SATELLITE TV THAILAND.

About Free Satellite TV in South East Asia:

Digital satellite TV and digital satellite radio have been around for quite a while now, but it was only recently that we found out that we would be able to find a FTA TV station of our liking, 24/7 ! After this discovery it was only a few weeks before we decided to investigate a little and buy ourselves a Digital receiver and satellite Dish and take you along on our journey of the skies and it's inhabitants.
Let it be noted that we are not pretending to be knowledgeable on the subject of satellite TV in Thailand, nor are we expecting to learn a great deal about the subject on this journey, but this is just our attempt to make things a bit easier especially for non-thai speaking people that are looking to learn about, or are interested in buying, a satellite dish with receiver in Bangok. If you are looking any type of illegal content or tips on how to pirate signals send from the satellites in Asia, you're definitely wrong here.

In recent years not only the number of satellites that serve TV station signals have increased dramatically, also the number of stations per satellite have gone up significantly. If you are looking for a listing of all satellites that are currently up there, we suggest you click here for an updated listing.

How many free to air TV channels can you get in Bangkok?

Currently the satellite selection screen on our PSI DP-303 receiver indicates that we should be able to view well over 400 free to air (FTA) TV channels. A number which must include a number of duplicate channels as, according to the PSI sat or other frequency lists, this number is larger than the total number of channels on all satellites we should be able to receive on our ditial receiver, in a ideal situation. That our situation is not quite as ideal as we had hoped for will be explained further on this site. When we let the automatic search form the menu / satellite / option do it 's thing, we noticed one possible reason for the larger number of stations: it would appear that a number of stations change their description from time to time and this causes our satellite TV receiver to interpret them as new TV stations. As we did not allow deletion of the exciting programs, these "new" stations are now added to the existing ones. (example: the TV station formerly know under the name Malibu, and until recently held the name Trace TV. Although this is an excellent Music Channel originating from cultural country of France, we do believe that it occupying 1 channel on our DP-303 satellite receiver is quite enough).
So, we figured out 1 reason. What else could it be? Ah! On another satellite we find several dozens of channel that are only indicated by ch. xx, without a name or other form of indicator. When viewing them they all appear to be some sort of sub channels of 1 or more of the Christian and / or News Television stations and they appear to be of the more temporary kind. For now we select them as "delete" via the Menu - channels option. This was at the same time when this year's first real thundershowers started to move in...

Weather influences on satellite signal reception:

Remember to never search for new channels / stations / satellites or television frequencies during a thunderstorm, or if you, for some reason, feel like you do need to this, make sure you do not allow the deleting of the TP program. We spend a good 2 weeks without any of the Thaicom-2 satellite's television stations, due to a slip of the finger! And, take my word for it: staying up half the night while waiting for a hole to appear in the clouds, is not an experience you would want to share with us, especially as it seems to put a bit of strain on marriages and / or other relationships!? However, after using the digital receiver for a few week and getting used to it, one becomes more familiar with the small adjustments it sometimes takes to have good television reception, even during thundershowers in our rain season.

Updating your firmware:

To get the most out of your sattelite Television viewing experience, if is sometimes necessary to upgrade your satellite receiver's firmware. Besides possible updates of your system software, these updates usually include the latest updates / additions of satellites, transponders or TV frequencies and if you have not been updated these manually, you may find that there are a lot news TV stations to watch after each upgrade / update. More about this soon, after we will have posted the latest DP-303 firm-ware.