How to watch the Salmond/Darling debate outside Scotland

If you really want to watch the Alex Salmond vs Alastair Darling TV debate on Scottish independence this evening, and you’re outside Scotland, and you’re determined to watch it on a large screen, but your broadband isn’t up to watching it online, and you have a Sky Digital or Freesat satellite box… still with me? Then I have good news.
Your satellite set-top box knows where you live, and uses this to show you ‘your’ local BBC and ITV region. All the regional signals are available to your box; but it just decides which ones to offer you up-front. You can, however, add other regions manually.
Look around your setup menu for an ‘Add Channel’ option. (You may need to manually enable non-Freesat channels on a Freesat box.)
You’ll end up on a screen asking you for some technical details of what signal frequency to search on. Enter the following:

  • Frequency: 10906
  • Polarisation: Vertical
  • Symbol rate: 22000
  • FEC: 5/6

You should now see a handful of channels, including (when I did it just now) several STV options. Select one of these, then save your changes. Now look for an ‘Other channels’ option: and you should now see STV listed.
If you want it in HD, you’ll need different settings – which, I believe, are:

  • Frequency: 10994
  • Polarisation: Horizontal
  • Symbol rate: 22000
  • FEC: 5/6

Frequency data courtesy of a516digital and Wikipedia.