Freesat Tuning - can it be avoided?

[JogaBonito]

I received my Humax Foxsat-HDR 500 Gb 2 weeks ago and have since then been trying unsuccessfully to tune it into Freesat. I have spent a lot of time fine tuning the dish alignment, checking the cables and now the signal strength and quality are excellent.
I live just outside Paris and have been using a Strongsat tuner for several years to watch British television, the signal and quality figures on the Strongsat are 85% and 98% on the Astra 28.2 satellites.
With the Humax I am able to manually tune into to all the transponders on Astra 1N, as long as I input the transponder frequencies as “User defined”, and I usually get 100% quality, I can view all the channels this way and record them, picture quality is excellent.
However one of the main reasons for buying the Humax was to be able to use the EPG and for this I need to be able to do the Freesat tune.
When I do the Freesat tune the post code (I’ve tried many regions) is accepted and from time to time it will find the freesat channels and allows me to save them, however when I do the save it returns to the postcode screen not the “finish” screen and when I try to view one of the freesat channels I get the “bad or no signal” message.
Can anyone explain what is the difference between freesat tuning and manual tuning, what does the freesat tuning require over and above manual tuning?
Manual tuning works ok for me.
I am able to tune to 11427H or 11428H and get a 70% quality signal and I believe this is where the EPG comes from?
I'm using a Sharp Quand LNB with 3 cables 1 for the Strongsat and 2 for the Humax.
If there is something else I can try to fix this?
I wondered if it was possible with the custom firmware to manually tune into the Freesat channels and to the EPG frequency thereby avoiding this Freesat Tuning stage?

 

[v12mike]

I presume that you have tried a reset to factory defaults?

Have you checked each LNB feed cable individually to ensure that they both have signal?

Do you have a signal on the Freesat EPG transponder 11428 H?

 

[JogaBonito]

I presume that you have tried a reset to factory defaults?

Have you checked each LNB feed cable individually to ensure that they both have signal?

Do you have a signal on the Freesat EPG transponder 11428 H?

Thanks for your reply.

I have done a factory reset, I do it every time I make a change, adjust the dish check the cabling, or try another postcode.

I've checked each LNB cable individually in the Strongsat receiver and and they are both giving a 98% quality signal.

Also when I manually tune into any of the freesat transponders, eg 10803H, I am able to find all the channels, save them and the "Diagnostics" screen shows 100% strength and quality on both tuners.

The signal on 11428H is 90% strength and 70-80% quality.

On other thing the "Freesat detection" phase takes a long time to go through at least 5 minutes, though it does finsh up detecting the two cables.

Another strange thing is that to do a manual tune for example to 10714 H I must use the "User defined" option and input 10714 manually, I can't use the 10714 H option in the manual tune menu, if I do I get no signal at all. When I input the frequency manually I get 100% strength and quality and can save the channels and view them.
I wonder if this is the reason that the Freesat tuning option doesn't work?