I now live in the middle of nowhere. There's no TV reception for Freeview and so I had no clue how to get a working TV because the analogue signal has been turned off. A trip to the local electrical shop solved the problem; Freesat. Read more here.

This is basically a box, which uses a satellite dish to get the signal to your TV. Brilliant! A one off fee for the box and it's all hunky dory. Except I don't have a satellite dish strapped to the side of my cottage.

Ebay, here we come. I bought a small satellite dish, which cost me about £20 including postage. I bought a Freesat box from the electrical shop. I followed the instructions here to set up my dish. Pretty easy as in the end I had to position the dish at the back of my garden on a wooden pole, bit of a bodge job, but what the hell, I'm not being paid for it…

Next up was to run the cable from the dish into the house. Bit of a nightmare as this meant digging a channel (only a few inches deep) along the side of my garden path for the cable to go in, and that meant manual labour ;). At the house end I drilled straight through a window frame - cable in - then plugged it with mastic type stuff.

The rest of the installation was super simple - follow the instructions in the Freesat menu system. It first of all scanned the signal and I found I had a 70% signal. Not bad for a bodge job. It then spent another few minutes setting up the channels (it found 114 I think), most of which I'll never watch.

As I have only a small TV (I'm really not into watching TV anymore), I decided against buying a HD freesat box, and went for a standard one (cost me £50). So, from start to finish;

1. £20 for the satellite dish
2. £5 for a length of cable and connectors
3. £50 for the Freesat box
4. And in time, about 2 hours start to finish for the work.

And I am able to watch TV!