I'm pretty sure it is do-able. I think I checked out I18 a couple of years ago on my 90cm dish with no problems. My only LNB that goes that low died, so I can't check again sorry.
I watch a lot of programs from Intelsat 18. I have a 90cm dish and DishTV S7090 decoder. The signal is strong and stable. The live news channel and the radio channels are the only ones that work without a decoder card. I have a decoder card, so I can watch all the channels. Most of the programming is in French, but the Arte channel also has the option of German audio. I always use the German audio because my German is better than my French. Most of the other channels have French subtitles which makes it easier to understand. The French are keen on rugby, so Six Nations are broadcast live. There's also a lot of cycling. Channels 2. 4, and 5 often broadcast films and series from America and Britain in English with French subtitles.
If you know some French (or German), it's well worth the trouble setting it up. The fellow who installed my dish had a lot of trouble finding the feed. It's an HD signal so you really need HD equipment to find it.
A regular cheapie sat finder will still find HD signals (or Data/telecoms etc), they are just looking for radio waves and don't know or care weather the radio waves carry SD/HD or internet.
The satellite aiming web sites will often tell you the skew, however, while this info is good enough to get you started, you still need to come back to it fine tune it later once you have a picture.
A dish isn't like a terrestrial aerial that will still receive a signal when 20 degrees out of alignment. 1 to 2 degrees off and you will get no picture. The bigger your dish, the narrower the field of view so if you are used to the 65cm Sky dishes, you will find that your 90 cm dish will be a little bit more "fussy".
When you initially capture/find a satellite, you need to fine tune the alignment for max possible strength on the Satellite finder before heading inside and checking for a picture. Just because the signal is strong enough for the sat finder to see something when you first aquire a satellite, doesn't mean it is strong enough for the receiver to display anything. As well as left/right/up/down you can also adjust the skew for best signal however if going from one satellite to an adjacent one, the necessary adjustment will only be a couple of degrees, and you shouldn't have much more than 30 degrees of skew adjustment between the eastern and western most satellites that you can "see" from NZ. If the dish alignment is reasonable, skew can be off by 5 or 10 degrees with out killing the signal - so don't get to hung up about it until you get to the fine tuning stages.
Do not manually program the transponder/channel you seek into your receiver - this drastically limits your options and makes it impossible to learn anything from near misses or about the performance or setup of your equipment.
1) Manual programming prevents you from receiving the signal if your skew is 90 degrees off (blind scan will still get it).
2)Manual programming also prevents you from receiving the signal if your receiver or LNB have drifted a few MHz (quite a common problem on non-premium equipment), a problem blind scanning will often overcome.
3) Manual tuning will also prevent you from receiving the channel if it has recently changed frequency, or the tuning info on the web sites is out of date.
4) Manual tuning will prevent you from receiving the signal if you have made an error setting the LNB L.O. frequency into the receiver. Blind scan often alert you to this error when the channels appear on odd-ball frequencies or appear multiple times.
Instead when tuning your receiver, do "Blind Scans" and allow it to tune all signals including radio and pay/encrypted TV. The other signals you pick up reveal important clues that help you find the channel you seek. For example you can determine if you are on the correct satellite, but just not getting the desired channel, or if you are on a near by satellite which is extremely useful info that reveals if your dish needs to be aimed further left or right. Receiving anything, even the wrong stuff is encouraging as it shows your gear is working correctly, and you're doing the right thing, the right way, albeit in the wrong place.
Once you find the satellite you want stay on, use the BER/Quality reading on your receiver to further adjust the dish alignment and skew. BER/Quality is more critical than the raw signal strength that the satellite finder shows you and concentrating on this helps reduce rain fade problems etc.
There are satellites that you will find that appear to have no TV or radio signals on them - don't be discouraged, keep trying. You will notice that the satellites are arranged in an arch across the northern sky, and this helps to know where to expect satellites and where there is nothing to see.
I find it handy to put labelled alignment marks on the dish adjusters with the names of all the wrong and right satellites that I find. With other satellites "mapped" this way it is much easier and faster to find the one you seek because you know approx. where it is in relation to the others. This is especially so when the signal is really weak and hard to receive - you can have much more confidence that you're on the right satellite and need better alignment.
I have helped some French friends getting Canal Satellite over Intelsat 18 and the dish installer had issues getting any signal until he understood that he needed a "universal LNB" instead of the "standard LNB" used for Sky here. They are using a 90cm dish as well.
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