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Sky Box Not Recognising Satellite Signal


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I brought two Sky boxes with me to France. One had been used by me with a subscription in the UK, the other bought off e-bay. Both have cards in.

I set up the satellite dish, got a strong signal (90%) and connected the first Sky box. It said 'no signal'. I tried the second box. It also said 'no signal'. I then tried a non-Sky decoder and got 165 channels, all from the Astra 28.8E satellite, so there is a good signal from the correct satellite.

The question is, what am I doing wrong/not doing, that means the Sky boxes do not recognise the satellite signal?
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It may not make a difference but it worth removing the cards from the Sky boxes and trying again. If you are using them for FTA (Free to Air) and not a Sky subscription the only difference they make is to set the first BBC channel to the region from where the card came from for local news. It would be nice to know what 'non Sky' box you used. It is not so much the strength as signal quality that is important.
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[quote user="Quillan"]It would be nice to know what 'non Sky' box you used. It is not so much the strength as signal quality that is important.

[/quote]

x2

You need a quality reading of at least 80/85% for satisfactory reception.

It's said that Sky News on 501 is the strongest channel and the one used for updating the EPG.

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The non-Sky box is a Fuji Onkyo F5000 HD from Auchan.

The signal quality is 60%, signal strength 90%, so perhaps I need to do some fine tuning of the dish. I am not sure that the LNB skew is spot on. I have taken the scaffolding down now, so it will be a week or so until I re-erect it and get up to the dish to tweek it.
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You will probably find a 90cm dish is the best for your area for a start. You might be OK using one of these cheap meters, either the analog or LED types. The dish needs to be of good quality as well. The analog and LED meters only look at signal strength and not quality although in the UK, where the beam is aimed there should not be a problem but the further south you go the pairing of strength to quality tends to part company unless you have a big dish. With cheaper dishes (and I speak from experience although I am not an installer) focal length i.e. moving the LNB back and forwards to the dish can make a difference as can where it points on the dish. Cheaper dishes do not always point the LNB at the exact focal point and tilting up and down or moving from side to side can make a difference. As you correctly say the skew can make a big difference to quality. Make sure there is nothing in line of sight and that the LNB is of reasonable quality and not to long a run on the cable with no joints. The Black Ultra LNB is pretty good especially up where you are and holds its quality through a range of temperatures which the cheaper ones don't always do and it is just a few Euros more in price. I personally tend to get a specialist in to set mine up but then I am much further south than you, have a much bigger dish and am in an area where the signal is known to be difficult.
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Q

I know you love your big dishes and that this has certainly solved your problems in the deep south, but really a 90cm dish in Cote d'Or strikes me as overkill. I am over 200km further south and can happily pick up in all but the most extreme conditions with 60cm dishes.

Lingone

60% quality is at the limit for picking up some stations and HD stations may not get through to the TV.

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[quote user="andyh4"]Q I know you love your big dishes and that this has certainly solved your problems in the deep south, but really a 90cm dish in Cote d'Or strikes me as overkill. I am over 200km further south and can happily pick up in all but the most extreme conditions with 60cm dishes. Lingone 60% quality is at the limit for picking up some stations and HD stations may not get through to the TV.[/quote]

 

My point being is that there is only a couple of Euros difference in price these days between 80 and 90cm dishes.

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What I do not understand, never having put a satellite dish up before, is how the supermarket receiver lets me receive over 200 TV stations, including HD, but the Sky boxes both say 'no signal'.

I will tweak the dish settings when I have someone to watch the 'quality' bar on the supermarket receiver, then try the Sky boxes again.

If I cannot get the Sky boxes to work, and really do want a twin input receiver, does anyone know if the Humax Freesat receiver has a stronger amplifier than the Sky HD box?
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A 'Stronger amplifier' is not always the answer, if it were we could have all added one to our dishes when they changed satellites and not have had to spend so much replacing them.

 

A very simplistic way of describing the problem is that if you think back to radio. If you had a portable one with a pull out arial and you didn't pull the aerial out enough you could still hear the radio but there would be a lot of hissing etc. Pull the aerial out fully and the hissing would disappear. The hissing we can call noise but the radio signal is still being transmitted at the same power. We can think of this as signal to noise ratio, the quality of the signal v the power. This is an extremely basic description of what is happening and whilst not totally correct is designed to give you a very rough idea. The quality of your decoder, LNB and size of dish are so important and any one can affect reception. Even worse with digital TV because the 'noise' can been seen as distorted or missing pixels on the screen often resulting in complete loss of picture. This is why whilst the power level is important the signal quality is even more important and the example I have given is designed to show you that you can have plenty of power (strength) but little or not enough signal quality for the decoder to get a 'lock'.

 

The Sky boxes only use one channel to indicate power and quality where as a Humax box does it for each transponder based on the channel you are watching. You can think of a transponder as being a tiny aerial on the satellite of which there are many and each transponder transmits six (if memory serves) TV channels. Some transponders transmit better than others hence you can get some channels from one satellite but not others from the same satellite and they ones you can't get normally are all on the same transponder.

 

So will the Humax box be better, well normally yes but then that depends who made your Sky box (Pace, Amstrad etc). Pioneer used to make them and were reputed to have been the best when it came to signal to noise but they don't make them anymore neither do Pace. I can tell you from experience that the Humax box is better than the old Amstrad Sky box (not the Sky+ box because I never tried one). It really boils down to the 'chip set' the box manufacturer uses.

 

The most obvious thing of course is do our Sky boxes work, can you test them in the UK either at home or round a mates house, do you know a fellow Brit locally in France who has UK TV that you could try your boxes on their dish? My gut feeling is it is the dish not aligned properly, could be to small or possibly an LNB that does not separate out the signal from the noise very well. The more you pay for an LNB the better it should be although when looking at the spec of the LNB you don't just want to look at the noise DB but the temperature range it holds that measurement over. The LNB I use holds the same reading over a very big temperature range, much bigger than a cheap one but then it cost just under £100 but I get massive changes in temperature where I live down in southern France near the Spanish border.

 

So why all this grief if it seems you can stick any old dish up in the UK, point it in roughly the right direction and get a perfect picture. Well that is because the 'beam' is aimed at the UK and is designed to work with a maximum dish size of 60cm. Of course in reality we know you can be outside the UK and use a big dish (up to 3m in Spain) and get a picture but Sky say officially this should not work and will not help you if you are outside the UK.

 

If aligning the dish proves to be a problem then I would suggest you get a technition in to do it for you. Whilst it may cost between 50 to 80 Euros it could save you a lot of grief plus he can test the LNB. He can also tell you if you have the right size dish. Don't forget also that the signal varies quite a bit from one area to another and it is not unheard of that somebody can get an excellent picture with say a 80cm dish yet 10km down the road people struggle with a 120cm dish.

 

I tried to make it pretty basic for you to understand, some may argue too basic I suspect so best of luck.

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Great news! I turned on the Sky+ box yesterday to fine tune the dish and LNB, and it showed that I had a signal. Adjusted the skew on the LNB and I now have over 90% strength and 80% quality. I now have all the free to air channels.

Many thanks to all those who contributed replies to my original post.
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  • 2 weeks later...
It may be dish size but can I suggest you try the following first. Connect up your Sky box to the TV and co-axial cable but NOT the mains, remove the viewing card.

Whilst holding down the BACKUP key on the Digibox - NOT ON THE REMOTE - turn the mains power on. Wait until all 4 lights on the front of the box come on then release the BACKUP key. You then wait for about 10 minutes or so (until the 4 lights go out again). Turn the box and TV on, you should have the signal back. This is really just a forced upgrade for the software but it works in a large number of cases of 'No signal being received'. Hope this helps.
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