Sony 43" KD 43XF879
SONY BRAVIA KD43XF8796BU 43" Smart 4K Ultra HD HDR LED TV
Sky + HD box. Im using the box as such at the moment. Pain having all the unavailable channels there though. New TV on the cards anyway!
Im very well aware of the different terminology and Sky/Sat not being the same as Aerial/Freeview. (hence my use of the word 'effectively')
My query was regarding the use of the 2 IF (just F?) connectors on the side of this particular TV. I know an aerial is needed for You View/standard freeview etc. But can my existing sky dish cable setup be used in some way? I don't believe this is a FreeSat TV otherwise it would state that along side or instead of You View surely? Would be nice to not have to bother with Aerial installation and also not crudely rely on existing unsubscribed Sky+ box for the free channels....
Yes as already posted IF stands for intermediate frequency. However it won't be as user friendly as genuine Freesat kit. You may have to manually select the right settings for a Ku-Band Universal LNB before tuning, but as this is standard throughout Europe chances are it will just work out of the box.
The channels are allocated a logical channel number starting from a fixed number, each time a new channel is found the lcn is incremented by one. If you look at the link I posted earliest the lowest channel number in the list gets the lowest number and so on. The actual broadcasts don't include a lcn and the only epg data is now next.
You can delete channels you don't want and renumber them to whatever you want within the range used by the generic FTA kit.
Compared to your SKy-box there's no interactive epg. But you can normally record them using a usb drive. As your proposed TV must have twin tuners it should be able to record two and or record one and watch another. Which depends on if the tuners (like Humax ones) can handle two channels at once from the same transponder.
As you will know you can't record at all with a unsubscribed Sky box, but you can view the epg with data for lots of channels you can't actually watch. You can elect to add up to 50 channels to favourites which will filter the epg to exclude ones you don't want if 50 channels is enough for your viewing preferences.
Some TV's that do have freesat tuning don't let you use both Freeview and Freesat at the same time. My neighbours Samsung is one. My Panasonic TV has two Freesat tuners and two Freeview tuners. All of them can be used at the same time.
The Sony TV satellite tuning capability is undocumented so sadly it will be a suck it and see situation.
A seperate twin tuner Freesat+ box connected to your dish would be a much more user friendly option and also is likely to add most of the free catch up services and paid for ones like Netflix.