Satellite-Aerial Combos
Having cancelled the Sky subscription, the sky boxes become expensive to run and useless with little chance of being able to reprogram them, so an alternative seems to be in order. The first problem that arises with the free to air services is that a number of channels available on Freesat are not available on Freeview, and visa versa, so while a pair of recievers could be used, a single combo unit would be more convenient. There are a number of suitable candidates from several sources, but older models use rather slow processors, where the newer models take advantage of faster silicon. All fortunately use Linux based stacks for their software, so any development work can be carried forward to new units as they appear.
While a pair of tuners would probably be adequate, since all the locations already have a pair of feeds from the satellite dish, a combo with an extra satellite receiver seems sensible if it allows either recording or onward transmission of the extra channel.
The first option that poped up was the Icecrypt S3700CHD, however that only has a 450MHz processor and requires an external hard disk for recording. None of the rest of the Icecrypt currently offer a better alternative, so widening the search, uncovered a couple of other manufacturers. VU+ and Technomate. While the VU+ product looks interesting, again they seem to be based on the older processor, while the Technomate unit looked better on paper. It has a newer 1.3GHz processor and takes an internal 2.5" hard disk in a small foodprint. Something around half the size of the latest SkyHD box.