A question about : Poor freeview reception. Which solution: New aerial, Sky multiroom, or some other.
I was wondering if you someone could help me a little. I'm normally rooting around the financial part of this forum and never really ventured into the techie forum before. Therefore please be gentle!
Englishman started a thread and I have also asked this question within there; however I didn't want to hijack his thread and so thought I'd better start one of my own.
We have a TV downstairs with a Sky+ box - all is great with that. I also have an old Sky box stored in the attic which works but for which I had no use.
My 20 year old portable CRT TV, which is in our bedroom, had just given up the ghost and so we purchased an LCD HD ready TV with the freeview decoder inside it.
I have an aerial in the attic which gives a poor signal (we have no external aerial), plus when I go on the freeview website and type in our postcode, it indicates that we can pick up all of the channels but we may need to change our aerial position (assuming we had one outside) and thus we should contact an aerial company.
We can pick up no digital channels on the new TV and the analogue channels are also poor (as they were before - I just never got around to doing anything about it).
I believed we had two routes:
1. Call out an aerial guy and ask them to install an external aerial for Ј200'ish.
2. Pay Sky for the multiroom option Ј9.95 per month and get them to sort out the cabling etc.
However reading Englishman's thread has made me think, taking into account I have a spare sky box, does anyone know if it is possible to connect the cables up somehow, so that I can watch freeview upstairs using the old spare sky box whilst the sky+ box is being used downstairs to watch all of the sky channels. I suspect I would need a new sky card to do this; however I'm not sure of the implications of it i.e. whether it will contravene the Sky T&Cs etc.
As you will probably tell, I don't really have a clue what I'm talking about. Hopefully a bit of research and some helpful tips from your good selves will help me on my way and stop my wife nagging me.
Thanks in advance.
Best answers:
- See my reply in the other thread here.
- Thanks very much - PhantomFlanFlinger.
- get an a/v sender, connect to both tvs :confused:
- Your Sky dish will probably have a 'quad lnb' which means four outputs, two of which are used for your Sky+ box
If you could run a cable from one of the spare outputs to the bedroom you could use the old sky box - You could put you postcode in here: https://www.wolfbane.com/cgi-bin/tvd.exe? it will tell you which way your aerial should be pointing and whether it should be vertical or horizontal. You can then try moving it in your attic. Failing that, look at your neighbours' roofs, ignore the aerials which are pointing the same way as yours and look for a new installation. Point yours the same way as that one and try re-scanning on the TV.
- if you have an old box I'd get it set up as a freesat box (like freeview for satalite)
If you've had sky plus installed recently there may be up to 8 feeds from your dish! (2 used by sky+)
the sky engineer that installed my sky plus box offered to install my old box as a private job for Ј30 (it took him an hour). This seems way cheape than a new ariel
this allows access to all the bbc/itv freesat channels https://www.freesat.co.uk/
if you wish you can also buy a sky freesat card for Ј20 from sky which gives access to more channels (like sky3).
I also have a tv sender which works great if you don't mind watching the same channel. - Hi all,
Thanks very much for all of the replies. I have a spare sky box, plus the quad lnb due to the installation of SKY+ and so I'll use the feed from that to go to the spare box in the bedroom.
I was hoping to do this over the Easter weekend just gone but as with everything, it never happened. I'll hopefully get it done fairly soon.
Thanks again for all of your help, it's very much appreciated.
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