Horizontal low band channels not being received???

thenobody

Hi,

Firstly the setup.
I live in an apartment which has a communal system for sky.
Sat dish is on the roof and uses a quattro lnb, cabled down to the plant room in the basement. The vertical high, vertical low, horizontal high, horizontal low and terrestrial cables come down into a Spaun brand Launch amplifier.
this then goes out to a Spaun brand multiswitch that feeds off to multiple apartments - two feeds to each.

Last week there was bad weather and a number of channels were reporting no satellitte signals were being received.
Most of these returned a day later when the weather calmed down.
Now all channels are fine except the ones that seem to be on the horizontal low band frequencies eg. Paramount+1, virgin, virgin+1, Dmax and channel 6 (ireland). Virgin channels come through but gets broken up quite often. Paramount+1 could not get a signal at all.
Rte, TV3, TG4 and BBC channels are showing but sometimes break up.

I had a guy who came to install HD for me last friday go up and look at the dish and he said it seemed fine but i didnt really have confidence he knew anything about it.

I am not sure if the amp is the problem. Could the amp be failing on a certain frequency band?
Yesterday I installed a small line amplifier onto the output from the amp to the multiswitch. It seems to have improved things a lot and now all the channels in question are coming in first time when i go onto them but are still breaking up a little.

Can anyone please help me out as to what might be the true cause of this problem on the horiz low band channels?
LNB? Amplifier? Multiswitch?

Im trying to avoid having to pay a lot of money to bring someone out to check it out as I know the other residents wouldnt bother or offer to help me pay for it.

If I add another line amplifier after the one i put in, would that improve it even further?
Or would it be best to add another one on the connection of the cables coming into my apartment instead?

Your help will be very much appreciated

Tony

If its a communal system then surely sky should send someone to fix it for you, is it just your apartment or are all affected?

thenobody

Its affecting everyone

Tony

Then you need a technician to identify and fix the problem, putting amps on will not solve the problem. LNB and water ingress would be the first thing I would look at.

thenobody

Yeah, it seems like its water ingress now. Hopefully.
the line amp i added improved things greatly. Got through full Sopranos episode on Channel 6 last night with just three minor pixelation issues. Before i added it couldnt even get a signal for the channel.
So maybe the water ingress is drying out and the signal is improving.