Help! Rubbish reception.

[admin_exported]

Following helpful advice given here on buying a TV, I thought I'd try and get advice on helping my folks out. Here's the deal..

Though they live within the london commuter belt, they may as well live in Atlantis with regard to regular TV reception. They can get a snowy four channels and that's it. They had Sky installed about 10 - 15 years ago and that solved the problem. Thing is, my mum watches 'period dramas' on the Sky telly whilst my dad sits in another room to watch other stuff on a small portable hooked to the normal aerial with bad reception. I bought him a freeview box but it couldn't get a signal, and he's just treated himself to a Samsung LCD (only 22" but bigger than the old portable) and that doesn't pick anything up either. Their neighbour had a guy come and install a new aerial 'cause he was also having the same problem, cost a fortune and didn't improve things much. Any ideas? Could they install a freesat thingy into the existing dish along with the regular sky box they have? Don't blind me with technobabble 'cause it confuses me and it'll terrify my parents when I print it off to give to them, but any help that won't mean them remortgaging would be appreciated.

Many thanks.

 

[daveh75]

Yes,they can run freesat and sky from the same dish, but will require the LNB (part on the end of the dish arm that receives the signal) to be swapped from a single port one to one with multiple port's i.e a dual,quad or octo lnb depending on how many set top boxes and whether they're standard or pvr stb's!

 

[kena]

Jim,

Short answer is yes, existing Sky disk can receive Freesat so you would need a Freesat box for your dad's TV - If they have had Sky a while presume its basic Sky not Plus or HD - The techie bit is you need another cable from your Sky dish LNB to your dad's new Freesat box beside TV. To use your existing Sky dish the LNB needs to have spare socket to connect 2nd cable otherwise you need a new LNB. Hopefully someone like Daveh75 will see post and advise as he will be able to give more specific comments on issue.

 

[kena]

Told you Daveh75 was your man

 

[Anonymous]

Many thanks Kena and Daveh75, but just to push things a tad further..

Assuming I get the bit on the dish arm replaced as advised;

1. Could my dad ditch the Sky subscription and buy 2, even 3 Freesat boxes ( would ideally like to run 3 seperate TV's) to run from the one dish?

2. Ballpark figure of what it may cost to replace the dish part?

Many thanks again.

Jim.

 

[Andrew Everard]

Yes, you can do that - using an Octo LNB (ie with eight outputs) you could feed up to eight Freesat boxes, or four Freesat boxes with twin tuner inputs and hard-disk recording, allowing you to watch one programme while recording another.

An Octo LNB? About £40-50, plus the cost of installation and the extra cabling. You'd need to get a local satellite installer to quote you for that bit.

If you only want to connect standard single-tuner Freesat boxes you can get away with a quad - ie four output - LNB, and just a single run of cable to each box, but frankly if you're having this done I'd go for an octo and twin runs of each cable to each location, to give you the option of using Freesat PVRs - ie with built-in recorders - in the future.

 

[Anonymous]

Excellent!

Many thanks Andrew.