yes you can, when u tune the freebox in it will ask for ur postcode in uk, type it in and u will receive the programmes from that area. we have 2 boxes both bought in the uk and they work fine.

Thanks. I have read the dish needs to be
a certain size, is this correct?

You can get freesat on a dish as small as 90centimetres however you may have some gaps during the day and it would probably limit the number of channels you receive, I would suggest a dish from a metre upwards, we have a 1.9 dish because we have sky as well and we can pick up around 900 channels on the freesat, plus we get BBC2, 3 4, + Channel 5 on freesat but not on sky for some reason, so you may need better advice than i can give re the size of the dish, but we are going to cancel sky as we can get everything we want on freesat!! hope that has helped.