Help - have Sky killed my mother's free to air channels?

twoinfinities

We had an existing satellite dish with 2 feeds to our living room and 1 to my mothers granny-flat through which she got her ONLY tv channels (satellite fta). We changed to Sky for broadband and tv in mid-December and when the engineer came I told him he was free to use the existing dish and cabling so long as it didn't cause a problem. He said it was a hybrid lnb and together we checked my mother's tv was working ok before he left.

Two weeks later, the signal to my mother's tv stopped - in the middle of Christmas. After trying everything I could think of I called Sky and eventually got to talk to someone who told me that this would happen with Sky Q because you can't have fta on the same dish. He said that even if he got it going it would be gone again in a few days. From this, I take it that it is some sort of encryption they put on the signal?

I explained all the above but all he said he could do was sell us a subscription to multiroom for her. I asked him to talk to someone there and call me back with a better answer, which he said he would try, but I'm still waiting.

I think I need to get my mother back onto exactly the same system she was on before because she is not good with change or technology.

Does anyone have any knowledge/advice about any of this, please?

Atlantic Dawn

Did your mother actually see it working when the job was first done?

The hybrid dish will support the seperate FTA connection no problem, if it was working on the day it was installed it should be working now, I would check that no cables are loose either at the receiver or the dish.

twoinfinities

Yes, it worked for about 2 weeks after the installation. I've checked cables etc (though I've just thought of one more thing I can check tomorrow) and there is honestly no reason that anything should have affected them in any way since.

While it seemed slightly strange that it worked for a time and then stopped, it also seemed like an unlikely coincidence that it would stop for any other reason such a short time after the installation so I phoned Sky almost as a last resort. I understood from the conversation that it was something to do with Sky not allowing fta to work on the same dish/lnb as a Sky Q. Does this make any sense?

Gerry Wicklow

No, the hybrid LNB should work for FTA even without any Sky contract. Most likely it is a loose connection, water ingress or a fault with the FTA receiver.

Atlantic Dawn

Could the TV/Receiver have been moved to put up Christmas decorations and cable is now loose?

The Cush

First off, the Sky rep on the phone was talking complete crap in order to sell a multiroom sub. Also they cannot switch off the FTA channels.

What box is she using?

As a quick test on the FTA box test it at the main TV point with both cables, because the feeds are wideband you will only see a small portion of the channels on the box if it is working ok. If you see nothing I would suspect the box.

Could also be a faulty output on the LNB, swap the cable to another legacy output and test if you're up there.

kmurph

This is the exact same kind of setup I got last year when I got Sky Q installed, using a hybrid LNB to feed two fta boxes in our house and both of them are still working fine. Almost certainly just an issue with the cable or the LNB itself.