The Ferguson Ariva 120 – My Thoughts

I’ve had my Ferguson Ariva 120 HD Combo for a while now and after initial struggles with firmware updates coming in quickly and thickly, things seem to have settled down now and the combo receiver is working really well and working as expected.

The first thing to understand is what a combo receiver is. Well, it is a TV channel receiver that can receive satellite broadcasts along with digital terrestrial channels. They are popular throughout Europe, but the particular situation Ireland finds itself in, television channels make them particularly useful in an Irish context. Ireland, with the launch of its new terrestrial digital channels called Saorview, only has 8 national channels and two of them only broadcast a few hours a day, so you could really cut that number down to six channels.

The beauty of our proximity to our often maligned neighbors, the UK, is that the beam from their Freesat satellite system also covers the whole of Ireland, expanding the range of channels we can receive here in Ireland to 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 can be viewed well, including all BBC’s, ITV, C4, E4, More 4, etc. and a lot of them channels are now broadcasting in HD too. The added bonus is that they are all free and 100% legal as they are called free channels and you don’t have to subscribe to anyone to get them.

With the way the economy is going here in Ireland, there has been a big shift towards open air systems and the Ferguson Ariva 120 seems to be leading the way. By lowering their price to a minimum, they have eliminated many competitors in the Irish market.

So why all the fuss? Well, as said, your TV is free. By simply combining a satellite dish and an antenna, you can get all the Irish and British channels in one box and not have to pay a penny after that once you’ve paid the down payment.

Personally, I have found the box to be easy to use with a good user manual and the box itself has a nice sleek glossy finish. I bought the box loaded with all the satellite channels so I wouldn’t have to do a scan. Tried this one day, just to see how it worked and it actually brought over 200 TV and radio channels in, but like I said before a lot of it was rubbish and after that I loaded my old channel list from my memory card. However, I must mention that the satellite scan was very, very slow, taking over fifteen minutes to complete.

The interface of the software is quite good, it has a fast response and it is very intuitive, so it is well done for Ferguson here. The only thing I would say on the negative side is that perhaps they could have used a better PSU. 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 himself indicates that you really should use a mains powered drive for recording purposes. Other than that, after all my initial problems, I find the Ferguson Ariva 120 cost-effective, reliable, attractive, easy to use, and while I miss certain aspects of my subscription TV channels, I certainly don’t lose the bills in the end. Of the month.