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Sky + Box no Card


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[quote user="Stan Streason"]No it doesnt. As well as having 2 cables to the dish you need to be paying the £10 per month additional fee to Sky for the service (and then they will insist on phone line etc)[/quote]

The phone line is usually so they can attampt to sell you pizzas, and not much else. As the recording hard drive is in the box, I've never seen why they charge an extra tenner, or am I missing something?

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[quote user="Richard"] Isn't 90% of it repeated about a million times anyway?[/quote]100% of the stuff you don't like is repeated - the other 10 is the stuff you would like to watch again..[:D]

Edit : Seriously though, the things I enjoy are always on at inconvenient times - that is my main reason for recording - that and the fact that you can skip all the ads.

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[quote user="Babbles"]Its for skipping the ads!!!! and as Coops says its to find the 10% of good things to watch but if the storage is in the box how come it won't work without a card, I am a luddite so am easily confused[/quote]

If you don't have a card then its not much use to you as a recorder. What you mind find interesting is THIS and does the same thing without a card and you can watch one channel and record another. The only thing, which I am sure somebody can help with, is if it needs a twin LNB? Its got good reviews and as one reviewer said it works in SW France.

I have a combined recorder with a hard drive which I bought cheap and I use with my old Sky box, if either go's bang thats the way I will go, I think.

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"The only thing, which I am sure somebody can help with, is if it needs

a twin LNB? Its got good reviews and as one reviewer said it works in

SW France."

It will work without a twin LNB/twin cable but it's limited, something to do with the channels being horizontal or vertical.

However it can do more than record one whilst watching another.

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I have been reading the spec and it looks pretty good, I would like something similar with a DVD player/recorder as well. Anyone got one or has anyone got any thoughts? One think I thought was that with this you don't really need a TV with built in Freeview or FreeSat so it should be cheaper which makes the price of the box quite reasonable.
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I have just bought myself one of THESE (it's my Christmas present from the o/h).  It's not functional yet as I'm waiting for my nice little chap to fit the quad LNB - but it seems to me to do all that I could want and I prefer my multi-functional kit not to include something as pricey as a tele which, if bits of it go wrong, are more expensive to replace.  Might be the sort of thing you could look at, Q.
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[quote user="cooperlola"]I have just bought myself one of THESE (it's my Christmas present from the o/h).  It's not functional yet as I'm waiting for my nice little chap to fit the quad LNB - but it seems to me to do all that I could want and I prefer my multi-functional kit not to include something as pricey as a tele which, if bits of it go wrong, are more expensive to replace.  Might be the sort of thing you could look at, Q.[/quote]

What a lucky chap Mr Coops is but I am sure he knows that. [;-)]

I saw that one and there is a Blueray version as well which if you have an HD video camera makes it easy to copy off videos and take them to your friends. It's about another £200 more mind which is the biggest problem. Hope fully my current setup will carry on working for a few years longer by which time the prices should have dropped. But anyway, yes thats the sort of thing I am looking for, thanks for posting the link.

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Oooo this creates more question,

Q if you have that freesat recorder thing would if you use it in France tune into french freeview (TNT) as freeview tellys do or the fact is pointing at the correct Astra satellite it would record UK.

In the guest rooms we use Sky boxes without cards which we have no plans to change but we do have a monthly paid card for the one we use and it is registered to a UK address, so if we wanted SKY+ would we just have to change the box and subscription or is there some rewiring required as I don't understand about what needs to come off the dish? The dish we have has 8 connections into so has the potential to run 8 TV as it was all a bit costly to install there's no budget to change it.
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In UK Sky will install Sky or Sky+ without a phone connection for an extra one off payment of £25. This is to avoid excluding themselves from a sizeable, and growing, market of customers who do not have or no longer require a BT landline.

That being the case I cannot see what difference it makes if that unconnected line is located in UK or in France [blink]

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Not sure exactly how it works but it's logical to assume that a Sky box trying to 'phone home' box will know only the standard UK 01/02 number, without a + or 0044 prefix, and consequently will fail if trying to call from anywhere else. Similarly if Sky were trying to call a box their system knows only the UK phone number given by the subscriber so again the call will fail.

I do not believe that Sky call boxes anyway. If you think about it any incoming call would normally ring your phone. To avoid annoyance the Sky box would have to be able to intercept a call instantly (pretty well impossible without at least a tinkle on the phone) and if it did then logically it would intercept all calls and your phone could never ever ring.

If outside UK then there is no point in connecting the box in the first place so no worries about getting 'zapped' !

Incidentally if anything were to get 'zapped' it would be the card not the box.

As I understand it then if you have a working Sky+ box in UK and you bring it to France it will work exactly as it did. Setting up one for the first time in France should also be OK if you have paid the £25 no line supplement call to activate it from a UK mobile.

You might even get away with telling them that you have no mobile phone signal in the room where the box is so can't follow their instructions and they will just activate the card [;-)]

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Keep in mind that when I did this I was in the UK.

I bought a second hand Panasonic made Sky box (I was told at the time it was the most sensitive and therefore the best for using abroad). This I believe is what is called an 'off contract' box. I then contacted Sky and bought a contract with them. All I had to do was give them the serial number of the box etc which I got from the 'Service' option.

They sent me a card through the post, I plugged it in (without the phone line being connected) called them to activate it and it all worked fine. I then bought the box with me to France. Now I don't know if you can do the same thing with Sky+ although I suspect you can. All you would have to do, if your box was in France, is to use a UK address to receive the card, phone form the UK to request it, and then get somebody to post it to you when it arrives.

Now then while I was typing this I thought of somebody who has Sky+ here in France so I have just called them. Apparently you do not need it connected to a phone BUT what you do have to do is phone them to activate the card (regardless of if you have a phone line connected or not, he didn't) which of course must be done from within the UK. You could get somebody to do that for you. He says its a great product and very simple to use.

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I was thinking of getting a second hand sky + box, there seem to be a lot around as people seem to be upgrading to HD, so it looks like I'll be able to change the subscription, I'm back in the UK for a month over Christmas so I should be able to do it then.

So Coops do you think it will need 1 of the spare connections from the dish, we will only have 6 TV's in the building so in theory have 2 so are connections so would need another cable running to the TV?
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Well, Babbles (not Bubbles as I said before, sorry!) I had always understood that one couldn't record one channel and watch another with a satelite signal as you needed a seperate signal to perform each operation (ie you're recording one signal and watching another), hence the need for two of your feeds going to the one box.  But as I said, this is not my expertise by any means so Sky+ may well function in a different way.  This is where Martin, Anton and co are needed...[:)]
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Well I've no direct experience of Sky + but....

With a lot of these sat PVR's,  you CAN record one thing whilst watching another using one LNB only,  PROVIDED that the two channels concerned share the same polarisation  (ie both V or both H) and lie in the same freqencyy band (ie both low or both high).

For free to air stuff from Britain this isn't as bad as it sounds,  as practically all the worthwhile channels are low band,  although polarisation does vary.   Sometimes you can fix this by choosing the "wrong" ITV region,  ie one that shares the same polarisation as, say, a BBC programme.

On one or two boxes I think you have to connect an LNB "out" socket to another LNB "in" using an extra short cable,   but as has been said it's much better to get a dual or quad LNB and do it properly so that clashes don't occur and both tuners are completely independent of each other.

Sorry I can't give specific advice on models,   but that's the basic principle.

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Now I understand it a bit more, I thought the cable from the dish was more like broadband one and could share more information, but I think we have a spare connection from the dish anyway so will need to run another cable.

Thanks for all the advice folks,

Coops, yes is Babbles but used to be Miss Babs!
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It's not a question of sharing information.

Each channel which comes from the satellite is broadcast in either vertical or horizontal polarity and a single LNB can only receive one polarity at a time, the Sky box determines which and switches the LNB accordingly. Although it's theoretically possible to split the single feed from an LNB to feed 2, or even more, receivers clearly if you wanted view a second channel which was in the opposite polarisation to the first you couldn't.

This is where a dual, quad, or even 8 output LNB comes in because although it is still only one LNB each output operates completely independently of the others so is able to receive a different polarity and hence feed another receiver, such as the 2nd one in the Sky+box.

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You've left out the band (low and high) issue AnOther,  which I covered adequately in any case in my previous.

As you say,  a (single)  LNB can only do one thing at a time,   but that includes its inability to receive two bands at once as well as its inability to receive both polarisations.

Just crossing your t's you understand......

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