How to get an old german Oyster Vision 1 satellite dish working on modern Freesat

Thanks for all your help!

Everything is now working brilliantly!

For the benefit of others I will record my experiences in getting my old Oyster Vision 1 up and working on Freesat.

Other threads on here and elsewhere talk about the possibility of an upgrade from Oyster if you have a certain chip inside. I spoke to Oyster Sat Tech yesterday, who were very helpful, and was told that this is no longer the case - it was in the past, but for whatever the technical reasons are - it is no longer an option.

So the only way to get this Oyster working - and it will work - is to position it manually.

There are several threads knocking around that explain how to do this, including one that says let the Oyster locate Astra 1, then set it to manual, and go 7 clicks to the right and 2 down.

This is what I did, but it's not as easy as it sounds. For me it turned out to be 6 right and 6 down! My theory is that every Oyster mechanism is different depending on age and wear - the dish moves slightly differently for each click.

The trick is either to have a satellite strength meter (I didn't do this) or to have a receiver that has a strength meter built in - most do - 2 bars - one for strength and one for quality.

What I did was to select the Astra 1 satellite on my receiver, and set the Oyster to seek out Astra 1 - it did this for me easily. I then set the receiver to Astra 2A (or E or whatever) at 28E and then, by trial and error, leaving several seconds between each click, tracked 6 clicks down, then click right until the bars show a signal. If no signal after 10 clicks, then click back to the start position, click up or down 2 clicks, then repeat. Count the clicks so you can back track. If you get lost, switch the unit off so the dish folds down, then start again from Astra 1. It sounds more complicated than it is!

I found that the vertical movement was much more forgiving than the horizontal - ie I could go 4 clicks up or down and still see a signal, whereas horizontally I would lose the signal 1 click either way - so the horizontal movement is much more sensitive than the vertical.

So for this reason I suggest making the vertical movement first.

Make sure you read the other posts about how to operate the Oyster box, which menus to select, and that the right arrow on the box actually moves the dish to the left!

If your dish is pointing at Astra 1, and you are stood looking at the back of the dish, then the dish needs to go a bit down and a bit to the left. Or to be more technical - Astra 1 is at 19 degrees east, Astra 2 is at 28 degrees east, so the dish has to move just 9 degrees to the left and just 3 degrees down - not a lot, but the satellite beams are very narrow, so the dish has to be spot on - little movements make a big difference.

You just have to approach it logically - like a puzzle. Even allowing for the differences in Oyster mechanisms, I doubt anybody will have to go more than 10 clicks down and 10 clicks right, so that's only a hundred different combinations. Mine just happened to be 6 and 6 - so I suggest others start there. 

For the more technical minded of you, basically what you have with an old Oyster box is nothing more than a motorised dish. Even if in the future, they make changes that loses automatic lock onto Astra 1, meaning that you have to do the whole thing manually, it's not rocket science. I downloaded an app for my Iphone called Dish Align which tells me where any satellite is in the sky from my location, so you can get a good impression where the sats are before you start - but you don't need to do this if your Oyster will successfully locate and lock onto astra 1 from switch on - as mine, and others seem to do OK.

(Background info) - just why don't these Oyster boxes work any more, and why are there so many Oyster haters online? The reason is that in order to point a dish at a satellite from a base that is always changing position - ie a motorhome - the Oyster has to look for something in the sky. So it starts up and scans the sky looking for satellite radio signals - it has a mini satellite receiver in the Oyster box. Each satellite transmits a technical signal that identifies it - so if Oyster is looking for astra 1 - it looks for Astra 1's identifier. The problem is that the Oyster 1 was designed for satellites that were up over 20 years ago. When astra went digital they also made a lot of technical changes and unfortunately this resulted in the Oyster not being able to identify the new Astras. Many people say Oyster should have known this, but realistically you can't expect astra to divulge their future plans into the public domain, and this particular Oyster was designed with 1990's technology which just couldn't cope with being re-programmed to seek the new signals. I can understand the anger, but anybody who understands technology will at least sympathise. Luckily the original Astra 1 is still up there working, so at least we have a work around.

So.....

Having had the Eureka moment of finding Astra 2 ... all I had to do then was to search for channels, but having done so I found half of them were missing. More online research revealed that my receiver, which came with the van, was almost as old as the dish, and then I reckoned that the same went for the LNB - it looked pretty weather beaten!. So having proved that the dish could get astra 2 and some channels, I decided that it was certainly worth spending some money. So off I went Maplins and bought a new LNB for £18 .... and while I was there I decided to go the whole hog and buy a new receiver, which I did for £99. It seemed a logical thing to do, as there has been a huge advance in the technology in the last 10 years. 

And this indeed proved to be the case. The new LNB took 10 minutes to install, during which time I also reset the "skew" - by getting my wife to call out the numbers from the screen, it became apparent that the old LNB was set to Germany - rotating it just a few degrees clockwise improved the signal even more, although it was fine in the vertical position - might as well do the job properly!

The new receiver makes the old one look like an old TV set! All pre-programmed and set up already - it showed pictures as soon as I plugged in the dish, before i even had chance to pick up the remote or read the manual. It has more bells and whistles than I could ever need and it's not even a top of the line model. I can plug an external hard drive or USB stick into it and it will act as a PVR and record programmes a bit like a Sky+ box. Also it will upgrade itself when necessary, over the internet or via the satellite. Another reason I bought it was that the old box had no HDMI out for my modern HD TV.

Finally I repeated the positioning thing about half a dozen times until it became easy. It proved to be reliably repeatable and I am confident that I will be able to do it easily, although it remains to be seen how wind and rain will affect it. However the Oyster 1 is a big dish by todays standards, so I expect it will work right down into southern France. The Dish Align Iphone app will also be useful for making the initial check whether it is worth even switching on the dish in a new location - to see if there are trees and buildings in the way, if there are it might degrade the signal. For this reason I am keeping my trusty old Omnimax aerial on the roof to still try and get Freeview from terrestrial transmitters. Now I have the best of both worlds!

So to summarise - forget about trying upgrading the Oyster Vision 1 so it will lock on to Astra 2 automatically - it wont - learn how to position it manually. Replace the LNB if the old one looks worn. Consider a new receiver if yours is quite old.

I knew the old satellite systems on german import vans had no guarantee of working - many are so old they are still on analogue. But if the dish will deploy, and you can control it's position manually from the control box, then you can get it working! I now have a fully working semi automatic system worth at least a grand! (maybe!)

Cheers and happy watching!