SKY HD - Can I supply my own box?

[admin_exported]

Having seen Sky HD boxes (without contract - just the tin) for sale for a lot less than Sky sell them, I'm tempted to buy one and ask Sky to provide the service.

I assume I can just take my existing Sky card out of my Sky+ box and insert into a new Sky HD box, contact Sky and asked to be switched to the HD service and hey presto....!

It's that easy, right?

Has anyone else tried this approach?

 

[D.J.KRIME]

Yep you are right in asuming that you can purchase your own Sky HD box seeing as you have Sky+ it is simple to install. Simply unplug your existing box and replace all cables into the back of the HD box pop in your viewing card, turn the power on and after a short while the box will have initialised itself and you are up and running and have also saved yourself the £60 Sky charge to do this! the box registers itself with Sky and your warrantry starts from then. But to activate the HD channels you need to contact Sky and they will happily, well for another £10 a month anyway turn on the HD channels.

 

[Anonymous]

Can I do the same if upgrading from ordinary sky - not +?

Thanks Grant

 

[Andrew Everard]

Slightly more complex as Sky+ and Sky HD need twin feeds from the dish to allow 'record one while watching another' operation

 

[D.J.KRIME]

You would need to get a QUAD LNB to connect to the dish then Run a extra coax to your box and to be honest unslees your are very competent at this sort of thing I recomend leaving it to a Pro.

 

[Anonymous]

Have to talk to my friendly aeriel engineer as the dish needs to be moved anyway -so he can re-cable and attach a quad LNB at that stage I suppose. I know you can get a sky hd box on a certain auction site for at least £100 less than from sky....

Thanks for your help chaps

 

[Anonymous]

I'm not interested in HD recording but if I could get SKYHD utilsing my existing cable then great. Could I just transfer from normal SKY to SKYHD by buying a SKYHD box for £299.00 and then connecting my existing cable from my 60cm Dish (not that awful small dish that SKY gave me) into the back of the SKYHD Box without having to run another cable for the recording side if I understand Andrew's post above.

 

[Andrew Everard]

TBH not sure. The box is a twin-tuner design, so not sure whether using it with just one feed would cause any problems.

 

[D.J.KRIME]

I have tried this as I was going to install the HD box where my nno Sky+ box was(I have sky multiroom)and the HD box will not initate properly as it shows a error message because it is not recieving anything on the second feed. Pluged it into where my Sky+ box was and bingo.