Well here we are in October with the weather just perfect and this corner of Spain back to the Spanish who live here and us incomers who have made it our home.  Having said the weather is glorious didn't the sandy rain come early and with some force.  We just cleared the garden and pool from the first covering when the second load of “mud” arrived!!!  Cleaning up gives the visitors something to do.  Anyone found a way of cleaning the mud layer from the bottom of the pool other than vacuuming to waste – it seems such a waste of precious water.

Tv news.  I expect most of you have found the proliferation of +1 channels recently added to the listings.  (These are channels that run 1 hour behind the main channel  -  handy if you are late in or the phone goes while watching something good).  The significant one is channel 4 +1 on listing 135.  It arrives down here on a much stronger signal than channel 4  and so those of you who cannot get 4  –  most 1.35M dishes don't – then at least you can watch 4 on 135 with a time shift of one hour or actually two hours from the UK.  So something on 4 at 11pm will be on 4+1 at 1am Spanish time.  Channel five also transmits on a second stronger signal than the main 105 listing but we need to programme that in to your digibox.  Call for details.
Those of you with 1.35M dishes and the poor winter reception they tend to give, don't forget we are offering upgrades to 1.45M dishes at a reasonable price.  The difference in reception is really significant – not up to the 1.8M dish but far superior to the 1.35M.
Those of you with widescreen televisions and Sky contracts will always have noted that much of the “uktv” (10 channels now) is in old style 4:3 format.  Uktv have announced a rolling programme from January 2008 of getting as much output as possible in widescreen.
There is no further information on the “freesat” bbc and itv system to be launched in spring 2008.  I seem to have frightened many of you into thinking we down here may lose the main terrestrial channels - that's not what I intended.  Things are going to change and we don’t yet know to what, so anything might happen but although the possibility of losing channels exists I doubt it will happen.  My own view is that it will stay the same or get easier for us to view but I can not be sure of that until technical details are announced.  Watch this space each month.

Well that’s about it for this month.  You can always call or email tv questions to us for direct answers or if it’s a general enquiry we can publish an answer here.

Article sponsored by Rainbow Satellites – UK tv in the whole of the murcia region.  Contact Alan or Matt for free accurate advise on 686 358 475 or rainbowsats@terra.es .  Look at our website Rainbow Satellites for some good basic information.