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The Fox Report Barry Fox’s technology column An opportunity for Manhattan’s new Freeview box A s Sky switches customers from satellite dish reception to online streaming, there is a growing park of satellite dishes ready, willing and able to deliver free TV and radio via the Freesat service – which is roughly equivalent to terrestrial Freeview. The main difference is that Freesat has some extra free channels (100+ in all, with 35 in HD). So now seems a very good time for the industry to sell Freesat receivers and recorders. That’s what makes it so strange that Humax, one of the pioneers in satellite reception, has quit the Freesat market. But this has created a big opportunity for Humax’s main rival in the “Free TV” business, Manhattan. So it was no surprise that the 30-year-old British company recently announced a new Freesat receiver/recorder to match its existing Freeview recorders. The S4-R Freesat 4K TV Recorder is Manhattan’s fourth-generation Freesat device. Conventionally, it has two tuners to record two program channels at the same time from a dish with two LNBs. However, if the dish has a more modern wideband LNB, as used for Sky Q, the S4-R can ‘tape’ four channels at once. This is possible because a wideband LNB outputs all the vertically polarised signals via one dish feed and all horizontal signals via a second dish feed. A smart receiver/recorder, like the S4-R, then decodes the two feeds into four program channels. Personally, I prefer to use the original type of LNB, but with four (Quad) or eight (Octo) F-plugs (instead of the usual two). That way, I can run separate satellite feeds to receivers and recorders in different rooms, with spare feeds to check dish alignment by testing signal strength. As the name suggests, the new Manhattan Freesat box can also handle 4K Ultra HD, if and when 4K broadcasts are available, or when streamed. The current Manhattan model has an onboard 500GB HDD, with 1TB and 2TB versions to follow, Practical Electronics | August | 2026 giving 300, 600 or 1,200 hours TV recording time. Live TV can be paused for up to two hours and rewound, too. The user interface is clean and clear, disinguishing between live TV channels and on-demand content from streaming sources such as BBC iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4 and 5. For copyright reasons, the streamed content cannot be recorded – just as Freely streams cannot be (legitimately) recorded. (Tech literates will of course already be aware of the low cost HDMI-to-USB capture dongles, which are widely and openly sold online to connect a receiver to a PC running free capture software like OBS). Pricing for the Manhattan TV S4-R 500GB model is £219.99, £249.99 for the S4-R 1TB and £279.99 for the S4-R 2TB. The box has both Ethernet and WiFi Internet connections and an optical S/PDIF socket for digital audio output to a soundbar or hi-fi system. There’s a clear instruction book printed on good old-fashioned paper – not just a weblink to an online manual. I found setting up the Manattan Freesat box easy and intuitive, with no need for the manual. During the process, I discovered a valuable diagnostic tool buried in the interface. When I plugged two dish LNB feeds into the receiver’s two F-plug sockets, the set-up screen warned that there was signal from only one. This suggested a bad connection or open circuit in one feed. But the screen also showed an “LNB Overload Detected” error message. I’ve not seen this before. Manhattan’s helpful Help explained that this message means the LNB feed is drawing heavier than usual DC current from the box, probably because of a short circuit in the feed cable, between the signal core copper and outer braiding. Armed with this simple clue, I tracked the cause down to a short circuit in one of the dish feeds. Once this was repaired, the error message disappeared and highquality pictures appeared. I also had problems connecting the box to my fibre broadband. A different error message helpfully told me that the box was connecting to my home network but not to the internet, either via an ethernet cable or by WiFi. But other equipment on the same network was working normally. It’s unclear why this happened. It could be related to the IPv6 settings on my router. I’ll probably never know because the problem self-solved when I played the usual trick of shutting down and rebooting everything on the entire home network, to create a whole new stack of dynamic IP addresses. As the IT Crowd always initially asked their helpline callers, “Have you tried switching it off and on again?” Perhaps it would make sense if all error message for all equipment now routinely offered similar offand-on-again advice. Bottom line conclusion: Even if it weren’t one of the few Freesat boxes left to buy, I’d be wholeheartedly recommending the Manhattan S4-R. Vape-powered drones I’ve previously written about the free source of lithium-ion rechargeable cells littering our streets. Every discarded single-use vape contains a good-as-new battery. As long as you use a safe charger designed for lithium-ion cells, several cells in parallel make a very useful power bank. Since the sale of single-use vapes has been banned, there have been fewer and fewer discards to pick up. But there are obviously stockpiles of unsold vapes, and they are now finding a good home A workshop in Ukraine is ganging batches of around fifty cells together to make a battlefield power bank, or using smaller clusters to fly drones. The story is here to read, with some videos which (hardly surprisingly) don’t reveal much about the manufacturing process: https:// PE pemag.au/link/accb 39