I’ve had my Ferguson Ariva 120 HD Combo for a while now and after initial difficulties with firmware updates coming in quick and plentiful, things seem to have settled down now and the combo receiver works great and performs as expected.
The first thing to understand is what is a combo receiver? Well, it is a TV channel receiver that can receive both satellite broadcasts and digital terrestrial channels. They are popular throughout Europe, but the particular situation Ireland finds itself in, in terms of television channels, makes them particularly useful in an Irish context. Ireland, with the launch of its new digital terrestrial channels called Saorview, only has 8 national channels and two of them only broadcast for a few hours a day, so it could really bring that number down to six channels.
The beauty of our proximity to our oft-maligned neighbours, the UK, is that their Freesat satellite system’s beam covers the whole of Ireland and also extends the range of channels we can receive here in Ireland into the hundreds. That may be on paper, but as you probably know, a lot of those channels are pretty poor, but there are still maybe 50 of them that are watchable just fine, including all of BBC, ITV, C4, E4, More 4, etc. and a lot of them, the channels now also broadcast in HD. The added bonus is that they are all free and 100% legal as they are called free channels and you don’t need to subscribe to anyone to get them.
With the way the economy is going here in Ireland there has been a big shift towards free systems and the Ferguson Ariva 120 seems to be leading the way. By lowering their price to the bare minimum, they have beaten many competitors on the Irish market.
So what is all the fuss about? Well, as said, your TV is free. By simply combining a satellite dish and antenna, you can get all the Irish and UK channels in one box and not have to pay a dime after that once you’ve paid the initial outlay.
I have personally found the box to be easy to use with a good user manual and the box itself has a nice sleek shiny finish. I bought the box preloaded with all the satellite channels so I didn’t have to do a scan. I tried this one day, just to see how it worked and it actually brought up over 200 TV and radio channels, but like I said before, they were all rubbish and I just reloaded my old channel list from my memory stick after that. However, I must mention that the satellite scan was very, very slow, taking over fifteen minutes to complete.
The software interface is quite good, responsive and very intuitive, so well done Ferguson here. The only thing I would say on the negative side is that maybe they could have used a better power supply. The Ferguson Ariva 120 had problems with my USB powered external hard drive. This is one of the first things you see in the user manual and Ferguson themselves indicate that you really should be using a mains powered unit for recording purposes. That aside, after all my teething problems, I find the Ferguson Ariva 120 to be cost-effective, reliable, attractive, easy to use, and while I miss certain aspects of my subscription TV channels, I certainly don’t miss the bills at the end. Of the month.
