I have sympathy with Idris Martin and some good news: he can get BBC South by Freesat.

More than that, Freesat provides all the BBC regional services for both BBC1 and BBC2, so at times I have watched the live Hogmanay show on BBC Scotland rather than the BBC1 "party" recorded weeks before.

It would be far more efficient if everyone now took broadcasts from satellites via a small neat dish on the wall, removing any need for the nationwide network of terrestrial transmitters or large rooftop aerials.

We live in a deep valley so had no choice, but the satellite signal is excellent.

So Mr Martin need just flick through the channels to find BBC from Southampton and re-tune this as the default feed.

Curiously, ITV regional services do not appear in the normal Freesat listings, but can be found by more searching. I recently bought a satellite decoder for £18; it's the size of a bar of chocolate and took very little setting up.

My biggest gripe is that the BBC threw its hand in with Rupert Murdoch and broadcasts via the Sky system rather than Eutelsat.

In the early days of analogue satellite as a language student I enjoyed many foreign channels.

The highlight was the 1999 total eclipse of the sun, which was invisible from the UK due to cloud but we followed on French, German, Swiss, Austrian, Greek and eventually Kuwaiti TV.

The mystery was a static picture on Bulgarian TV, which was explained the next day in a newspaper clip that the Bulgarian TV crew had been suspended, as they had been filming a porn shoot when they should have been showing the sun.

Allan Reese

Forston