Can I use a previous owners tv dish?

If the dish and the cables are still there then you can use it. Providing you have a satellite cable coming in you can either connect it straight to the TV if it has a satellite connector or via a set top box like Humax or Freesat.

You then just need to tune your receiver (either the TV or the box). 

Thanks marcliff but it's no longer connecting. It suddenly closed down and now says 'no signal' I thought I must have been using it for a short time unofficially.

There is  no contract or fees to pay for a satellite connection. It's like getting a normal TV signal. If you are showing no signal then your dish needs to be realigned to make sure it picks up the signal. It's not like a pay for view or anything; It just picks up the signal and that's it. You could also check the connections and get someone out to make sure it is picking up the signal and your connections are OK.

It's not a switch off if you haven't paid the bills type system.

Thanks for the info. I'll phone the engineer who it seems might have ripped me off.

Your post is a little confusing especially when you say "service provider", who are you talking about. Do you mean the the engineer who charged you to fix it?

If it worked after that but has subsequently failed then depending on how long it's been and what's gone wrong now it's not entirely unreasonable for an engineer to charge you again.

That being said unless there were new parts involved €149 would seem a bit expensive.

When a friend had a new LNB fitted and his dish realigned not so long ago IIRC the labour charge was €70 or thereabouts.

Do you know what nationality the previous owner  was, if they were not from UK their satellite dish may have been for them to receive a signal for tv in their country? Sat dishes to get UK tv are generally a lot larger than those for other countries, if it is a smaller dish then you have been wasting your time and money in trying to get UK tv 

Hi

Assuming the cable from your dish goes to a box, and then a second cable goes from the box to your TV....then it's unclear whether it's the TV saying "I'm not getting a signal from the box", or it's the box saying "I'm not getting a signal from the dish". So switch the TV and the box off (just unplug it if it's easier) - then switch the TV on again. If the TV shows exactly the same message (ie whilst the box is still off), then it's your TV not getting a signal from the box. If you get different message, then the original message was your box not getting a signal from the dish. 

Which suddenly makes me think - is your box fully switched on? Whenever we have a power cut, and then power is restored, the box (Sky in our case) comes back on in standby mode and the TV says "no signal". We have to remember to switch the box back on - it's caught us out more than once!

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Steve