Problem with Sky reception

radioactiveman

Hi,
I was just wondering has anybody any experience with poor reception on sky? I am having a real problem at the moment with channels skipping or becoming 'blocky'. At times it's actually unwatchable.

When it was installed a proper wall plate wasn't put in - the cable just came straight out of a cheap wall plate with a hole in it and into the sky box. I replaced this and got a proper shielded cable to go from the wall plate to the box..

The only thing I can think of is that the cable from the dish to the box is cheap and has no shielding. Can I get sky to replace this? As well the reception only shows at 3/4 strength - don't know if it should be at full strength.

thanks!!

byte

Signal Strength isn't that important. The important one is the Signal Quality!

What kind of cable has been used? Is there no foil on it? If the cable is that nasty stuff with just a bit of braid and no foil, then that would most likely be the problem. That sort of cable shouldn't be used for anything, not even terrestrial, as it's absolutely useless due to the signal loss it incurs.

The satellite installer should have used the proper cable in the first place, so just make sure the cable is as bad as you describe.

miss_sunshine

Hi there,
I had a similar problem with my sky dish, there were a lot of music channels etc we couldn't watch because they were 'jumping' a lot. To fix this problem, we contacted Sky, who came out and checked all our connections, sky dish, receiver etc and fixed the problem by installing a new dish and giving us a new receiver....
You definately should contact Sky, its important for your own sanity!!!!

Miss Sunshine

steveon

The reason the original wallplate has been removed is that it may have had resistors in it that didn't allow power to pass through it and therefore, not allowing the lnb to receive power to allow the box to function.

Regardless of the type of wallplate used you will actually loose a small amount of signal quality as a result of use of one, but not enough to cause you problems. If you have power in your attic have you considered moving your box up there and using a magic eye to control it from your living room...this may help with the quality issues your suffering...

byte

Moving the box might solve breaking up issues, but at the loss of RGB Scart, Widescreen switching and stereo sound.

Ronan H

Hello... I had the same issue last year, after doing some manual stuff over the phone a guy had to come out and fix it. All that was wrong was the dish had moved with the wind. Cost me €150 quid though or something like that, but it was worth it to get it sorted and avoid the stress of having to try and move the dish myself...

Dish Head

byte

€150 to reset a dish? :eek:

steveon

did I read that correctly €15o to move a dish ....Id drive to dub to do it for that price if I taught I could overcharge like that lol..

radioactiveman

hi thanks for the advice - I think I'll call sky to see if they can at least replace the cable because this is actually going on for more than a year and it's not like it's cheap either.
I think it's the cable. There's an ordinary aerial cable coming down from the roof beside it so my hunch is that there's interference coming from that. The cable is literally just a copper wire, with white plastic around it, then copper braiding and then the black outer coating.
Trying to get sky to fix it without a charge though is another matter... miss sunshine did you have to haggle with them much?

steveon

I dont think sky are under any obligation to change internal cabling for you, and its usually quite difficult to change unless adequate trunking is used in the walls to pull it back and change...

Ronan H

steveon wrote:

did I read that correctly €15o to move a dish ....Id drive to dub to do it for that price if I taught I could overcharge like that lol..

Yeah its a lot alright but they werent able to identify the problem through the phone with their manual checks so they had no choice but to send someone out. The cost was for the callout as such, regardless of what had to be done, so if the box was knackered or the dish needed replacing that would have been covered, it just happened to be the case that the dish needed moving, a case of bad luck really!

Ronan