Hi Peter, I tried tuning this in today and realized what the problem might be:
This satellite is a little trickier to find on a satellite finder because it only transmits to NZ Ku Low and only on horizontal polarization. This is not a typical configuration in this part of the world and can catch people out.
Free view, and many other satellites transmit on Ku Hi (default setting for many receivers) and on both horizontal and vertical polarization.
This means, when looking for the Free view satellite, you can usually totally ignore the receiver settings, plug your sat-finder in and find it. IS 18 is not this easy.
When looking for IS18, you first need to make sure your receiver is switching the LNB to Ku Low and polarization to horizontal (your sat finder may have LED's which indicate the present state of these settings) - any other setting will yield very weak or zero results on the sat-finder. Look in the receiver settings for dish or LNB settings that talk about 22KHz and 13/18 volts and you are on the right page.
You need 22KHz off (= Ku Low), and voltage set to 18 volts (= horizontal). Once you have these settings the LNB is set to receive IS18 and your sat-finder has a fighting chance of seeing it. Start looking for the satellite with the sat-finder calibrated to mid-scale (5), not zero and not full scale (10).
Once you have the dish aligned, you can safely return both those settings back to auto/both without loosing the picture.
I found 4 FTA French channels.
The signal was nice and strong on my 90cm dish - approximately as strong as Free view on a regular 65cm sky dish.
Skew was basically zero degrees (maybe 5 degrees clockwise if you are behind the dish). I could twist the skew up to 30 degrees either side and still get a solid picture, although signal dropped by about 50%. Like I said earlier, once you have a picture tuned in, come back and use the receivers signal quality indicator to fine tune the dish alignment and skew to optimize the performance for maximum resistance to rain fade.
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