The Dreambox DM8000 HD is my fourth satellite receiver since a couple of sat dishes were mounted onto my house in September 2000.

The first one was a Panasonic Sky digibox (TU-DSB30), which was useful as long as the satellite footprint of BBC TV channels reached my home in south east Norway.

When the footprint shrunk I bought a Nokia Mediamaster 9802 S. I can't quite remember why I ditched that one for a Topfield TF3000 CoCl, which I've been very happy with, until the advent of HDTV.

After buying a Panasonic plasma TV (TX-P42V20) in the summer, I started looking around for an HD capable satellite receiver. I'd always been interested in the Dreambox concept, and now was as good a time as any to give it a try. Bought mine from a Danish retailer - quite a bit cheaper than the Norwegian dealers take.

It arrived on Wednesday, and I let it acclimatise for a day to the ambient temperature. I printed the instruction manual and read it from A to Z (though I do wish somebody could persuade the Dreambox company to hire a professional native English-speaking translator - the syntax is pretty hopeless at times)

Yesterday, I installed a 1.5GB hard drive, and a DVB-T tuener for terrestial Norwegian channels.

Connecting the various leads was relatively easy - though the DVI output is very close to the scart outputs, in case you want to use both.

Turning on the receiver for the first time, I was a bit confused by the flash screen, which started with a symbolic earth image in colour, before turning black and white, while the aspect ratio went through a few of its options. I suppose that's what's supposed to happen.

I let the introduction wizard take me through the first setup steps. Even managed to get the box connected to the local network too after a couple to tries.

First mistake: Believe it or not, I was sure I'd connected everything which needed connecting before I started searching for channels.

After one an a half hours of multiple fruitless searches, I suddenly realized I hadn't connected the cables from the satellite dishes - felt a right twit! That said, I've found that things hardly ever work out of the box, there's always something needing tweeking.

Here comes what so far has been a bit of an exasperating experience.

One of the satellite dishes has one LNB pointed at the Astra 2 satellite, 28.something east. The second dish has two LNBs, one pointing at Astra at 19E and the other at Hotbird 13E.

Since the Topfield only had one tuner, it was connected to the Astra/Hotbird combo.

But it gave me all the channels I wanted, i.e BBC radio, and free French/German/Italian TV and radio channels.

So I started doing a channel search. To cut a long story short, I've tried multple combinations starting with single satellite - direct connection, configuring first LNB A (where I thought I'd attached the AstraI/Hotbird combo cable) and progressing to two then four satellites (DiSEqC A/B and DiSEqC A/B/C/D), incorporating LNB B, and tuner DVB-T.

During these searches the satellites were allotted different ports and entered in different sequences. Sometimes I tried tuner DVB-S/S2 A on its own, sometimes tuner DVB-S/S2 B on its own. Sometimes I reverted to a single satellite on one or the other tuner, etc. etc.

As I exhausted the possible permutations the number of channels grew. By midnight, I had about 1600 altogether (after roughly 15 separate searches of 20 minutes each, 8 crashes and channel testing via the old Topfield to make sure the cables and satellites worked properly).

The result?

I still haven't managed to access crucial (crucial to me anyway) channels such as RAI Radio 3, the German ARD and ZDF radio and TV channels - 3Sat, Bayern Klassik, Das Erste, ZDF Theaterkanal, etc. etc.

I've also tried manual searches - which I'm used to doing on the old Topfield, entering frequency, SR, Fec etc.).

So why aren't these channels showing up? What should I have done which I haven't tried already?

(I might add that I flashed the software this morning with the latest from Dreambox.de. The operation was successful, but made no difference to search success.)

I'm sure there must be a simple explanation. I don't have a toneburster by the way - that's why I selected the DiSEqC option.

Grateful, needless to say, for all and any suggestions. I'll also try and answer questions if I know how.
  1. How many downleads have you got?
  2. What are they connected to?
  3. What is your switching arrangement?
  4. Which LNBs are connected to which ports on the switch?

Once you post the answers to those questions it will be easy to tell you how to configure your tuners.