Reusing An Old Sky+ Box

[harveymt]

I still have my old Sky+ box in the house from when I upgraded to Sky+HD. I have multiroom and want to know if I could swap the bog standard multiroom box (it's about 5 years old) for my old Sky+ box?

There is only one line into the box so I realise I couldn't tape one program and watch another but it's really only to tape the end of programs i might be watching before going to bed.

If it is possible is there anything you need to do about cards? Do I just put my existing card in the old box?

 

[The_Lhc]

If you ring Sky up and tell them you want to go to multi-room they'll send an installer out, I'm using my old Sky+ box in this way, the installer was quite happy to run as many feeds as was required for the Sky+ box to work normally. In fact, because the original dish was so far away from where the multi-room box was going he actually installed a completely new, additional, dish. Which was nice. The house now looks like it's escaped from Goonhilly but I can live with that. They'll supply you with a new viewing card if necessary, I think I re-used my original viewing card, can't remember now.

I'm more worried about the bracket the original dish is mounted on, it's been there so long it's nearly rusted through, I expect that won't be cheap when it needs replacing...

 

[harveymt]

I already have multiroom. I was wondering could I swap the ordinary Sky box that doesnt record for my old Sky+ box? Or would viewing cards be an issue?

 

[daveh75]

harveymt:I already have multiroom. I was wondering could I swap the ordinary Sky box that doesnt record for my old Sky+ box? Or would viewing cards be an issue?

The viewing card won't be an issue, you'll just need to phone Sky and ask them to re-pair it to the Sky+ box.

However, Sky+ boxes don't have 'single feed mode' like Sky+HD boxes do, and don't really like being fed from a single feed as they tend to throw up no sat signal/recording failure messages.

There is a way round it by manually setting up a 24hr dummy recording and repeating each day, which fools the system into thinking that tuner2 is busy/unavailable even though no cable is connected to it.

But i would recommend getting a second feed run to the box, it wont cost much, or if you have any DIY skills at all, then it's an easy enough job to do yourself...

 

[The_Lhc]

harveymt:I already have multiroom. I was wondering could I swap the ordinary Sky box that doesnt record for my old Sky+ box? Or would viewing cards be an issue?

Whoops, should have read your post properly, sorry...

 

[harveymt]

I'll run an extra feed myself then. I had to drill through an interior wall and lift floorboards when it was installed anyway as the installer said he was only allowed to drill through an exterior wall. It's easy enough now to run an extra cable.

Cheers for the replies.