Free to Air Satellite Receiver Full HD DVB-S2 + USB Port Schedule HD Program Recorder, Labgear VSAT02 Compact TV Satellite Box with Remote Control

Good price, works well, brilliant picture quality and was very easy to set up. No negatives at all that we've found so far. (used for German TV free to air broadcasts in the UK)

Quirky little device! You are probably buying this in the UK to receive FREESAT? If so, read on.... When you tune it all the Free to Air channels, they are numbered randomly. It has no postcode feature for regional channels - so you have to look through 15 ITV HDs and find the one that works (14 were listed and didn't) but 0330 was the one that did. You then manually move it 0003 (so you can easily select it). I thought the box didn't work at first but you have to go through them all to find the one that does. No wifi - so no catchup (iPlayer) or casting (YouTube), It takes about two hours to get the channels into the Freesat numbers that you know. What you lose in time to do this you gain in £150 saving on a Freesat unit. It records OK but you have to tell it how long to record i.e. 2hr 30min. There's no native little feature like on Freesat where it adds 3 minutes to ensure you get the end or if the program moves/over runs - will record it anyway. Another one is the Channel 5 films that have a 5 minute program in the middle - recording the first half of a film doesn't automatically record the second half. New channel added on the satellite or Freesat channel renumbered - you have to do it all manually and then move the channels around again. This is ideal for a bedroom where you want to watch 10 channels and generally don't want to record. Timeshift allows you to pause live TV (with USB memory stick) but when you press play again it jumps forward in time to live (not how Freesat boxes work) so you miss that bit! It would drive me crackers if it was my main TV device. The remote isn't intuitive either - the button conventions are just odd. If you could point your dish at other satellites (not Astra) there may be other foreign programs you could watch but you really need a 1 meter motorized dish for that and then you should buy a proper receiver. Quality of the HD picture is excellent though. Remote very flimsy.

Just replaced old unit This one set up easy and working great

Not bad. But the remote control not the best looks ok but center cursor very finicky and Orchard for me but may be ok for others. Receiver works ok not massive on settings. Large up down button cant change to chanel up.down only does 8ch at a time.

Great piece of Kit. Excellent picture quality.

These last few weeks several tv stations have disappeared or turned to HD. I rely on Freesat, and as a result it's becoming increasingly difficult to find something to watch. Select a programme I used to watch and now I often get 'no signal'. Had the engineer check to disc etc and he recommended a manhatten box, but when I looked at the reviews, it seems they're not all they're cracked up to be. And so I bought this. Big mistake. The enclosed pamphlet is, frankly, an insult. Don't look for 'how to set up' because it's not there. Instead, pages and pages of tiny print covering a multitude of technical bumph. Frankly, if I understood that, I'd build my own set. As it's cheap, the cost / hassle of sending it back is not worth it. I'll just throw it away, still in box. So, in essence, don't go anywhere near this item. Does it work? Who knows, but with the way things are going, not to mention the licence fee, I may well give up TV when the licence is due at year's end and go back to reading.

Bought this as an affordable replacement for an old freesat box, given how little I watch TV I couldn't justify paying a premium , and it works just fine. It does need yuu to read the manual, but the blind scan feature works well.

I've given this receiver 4 stars, but it would have been 5 stars, but for what seem to me two major failings in LabGear's marketing. The receiver itself is every bit as good as my previous one, with the added advantage that it is very compact & therefore doesn't require a lot of space. The picture's good, the sound is good, you can organise channels as you want them, you can re-name them and. importantly, you can either delete or ask it to skip channels you will never watch, thus avoiding clutter. However, I do undertand why some reviewers decided to send it sstraight back to Amazon. I would never have been able to set it up properly, if I hadn't learnt how to do it with my previous receiver. The instructions are woefully inadequate. For example, I wanted to receive channels from 3 different satellites. To do this I first had to tell the receiver that my equipment included a switch (called a DiseqC) and give each satellite a different letter. All this is easy to do, but it is not even mentioned in the instructions. Secondly it was a big mistake to pre-load channels from Astra 2: my receiver was set up for Northern Ireland, whereas I live in Scotland &, in additon, all the ITV channels and channels like More 4, Film 4, etc, had moved to a different transponder since they were loaded. All the pre-loading did was to create confusion: far better to have given the user clear instructions and left them to scan the satellite(s) themselves. In short, before you buy this, you need to know a reasonable amount about setting up a satellite receiver or arrange to get an expert to do it for you.