Sky+ Woes

kayone

kayone

kayone

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Chesterfield
Just had Sky+ installed (well... box unpacked & plugged in)

The guy who came was from a third-party company to do the install on behalf of Sky. However he mentioned somthing about needing two sky signal lines in order to be able to use Sky+ properly - so in effect I've actually got bog standard Sky through a Sky+ box. He also mentioned Sky charge £150 to have this extra signal line put it which is ridiculous.

Anyone know any detail on this - he managed to just fob my other half off because I wasn't actually there to ask questions.
 
Sky+ uses 2 incoming lines from the satalite dish to enable you to watch one channel whilst recording a second one.

I have a similar problem, because the flat I live in has only had one line run to it from the main dish on the building. What I have to do to record shows is to leave it on the chanel I want to record which is only useful when you go out and don't want to miss a show.

£150 seems a bit high tbh. If I understand it properly, all he would be doing is to connect a line to your existing sky dish (as long as theres a spare port on it) and then run that wire to your sky box and then terminate it. I would phone sky themselves and see if its any cheaper.
 
As TheKnat says, you are after either a Dual or Quad LNB, a length of 75ohm aerial cable (I am biased to Belden myself) and 2 cable ends. Personally I would pay someone to do it only for the LNB alignment part, but if you are dead certain of the existing LNB position before you sway it you could be fine. £150 is excessive.

kayone said:
The guy who came was from a third-party company to do the install on behalf of Sky.
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Erm, did you pay sky or get a deal out of Sky to get Sky+? At my ghouse and my folks house they ran the extra cable and fitted a different LNB included in the 'installation'!
 
Mr Footlong said:
As TheKnat says, you are after either a Dual or Quad LNB, a length of 75ohm aerial cable (I am biased to Belden myself) and 2 cable ends. Personally I would pay someone to do it only for the LNB alignment part, but if you are dead certain of the existing LNB position before you sway it you could be fine. £150 is excessive.



Erm, did you pay sky or get a deal out of Sky to get Sky+? At my ghouse and my folks house they ran the extra cable and fitted a different LNB included in the 'installation'!
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Called Sky who passed me onto the third party to order - who then called me back to arrange install when my viewing card arrived from Sky.

I live in house of apartments, and it's a communial system would there be any implications - I do have a 'Sat 2' port on the wall behind my tv but I did a quick signal test using the port through my sky box and it came back dead.
 
kayone said:
Called Sky who passed me onto the third party to order - who then called me back to arrange install when my viewing card arrived from Sky.

I live in house of apartments, and it's a communial system would there be any implications - I do have a 'Sat 2' port on the wall behind my tv but I did a quick signal test using the port through my sky box and it came back dead.
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Ah, so you are communal as well :(. In that sistation most people are stuck with just the one lead, as if you all share the same dish and are not allowed to put up your own, no changes can be made to the dish without express permission. You should enquire about the SAT 2 port, be it through neighbours etc to get a quick idea or through whoever governs the building/dish.
 
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Mr Footlong said:
Ah, so you are communal as well :(. In that sistation most people are stuck with just the one lead, as if you all share the same dish and are not allowed to put up your own, no changes can be made to the dish without express permission. You should enquire about the SAT 2 port, be it through neighbours etc to get a quick idea or through whoever governs the building/dish.
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Just called Sky to see if I can get any advise also. They basically said the same they need permission from the landlord to enable them or whoever governs the system to enable the second sky feed.
 
kayone said:
Just called Sky to see if I can get any advise also. They basically said the same they need permission from the landlord to enable them or whoever governs the system to enable the second sky feed.
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Yeah sky won't install you if you use a communal system, they will reccomend another company.

Could be worthwhile looking into getting a second cable run down, as yeah you basically have a sky box with a pause button.
 
You can record aswell, just not record one channel and watch another. And live pause works, but I think you lose the anytime tv function, though could be wrong. There are a few bonuses however, optical out, seems to be better picture quality etc. etc.
 
Hi Guy's - Yeah, seems I can record but I have to be on that channel in order for it not to fail. Minimal Use.

Can however pause etc which is a bonus I supppose.

Awaiting my Landlord to come back to see where I stand in terms of getting my 'Sat 2' feed enabled.
 
check out sky anytime - press tv guide then red button and see if it has downloaded any content for you. it's quite a nice feature and may help you decide to keep it! as said above you NEED 2 feeds to enable most of the Sky+ features....so keep up the pressure on the landlord, although I'm not sure it will work. you can only easily get 4 feed lnb's so that means that most people will be stuck with just one feed.
 
Communal systems will (should) use a quattro LNB which means getting 2 feeds to each apartment is a non-issue, it just depends on having spare distribution capacity.
 
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