Sky box question

[Ken Sington]

Our Sky box, which iirc is a Sony unit, seems to be giving up the ghost as it losing channels. As long as I have a Sky account and Sky card, can I buy any satellite receiver to replace it, or do I have to get a new box direct from Sky?

[DeputyDawg]

Sure, nothing to stop you. But wouldn't it be easier to get SKy to replace with latest offering?. The Sky + boxes are not bad but I guess it's your money at the end of the day.

There may be other favourable boxes that produce better picture quality (Technomate?), I'm personally not up to date with latest sat boxes.

Edited by DeputyDawg on Wednesday 24th February 10:44

[dalos260]

We have Sky at work (great for keeping up with the latest scores on a weekend ), and recently it's been gradually losing channels too. However, there are two boxes running independently from the same dish and they are losing the same channels. That seems to indicate that the boxes themselves are ok, so we are thinking it's the LMB's that are at fault or the dish has moved or something.

Just thought I'd mention it incase you replace you box and find that the problem is still there.

I'll update when the bloke comes to fix it.

[MonkeyHanger]

Ken Sington said:

Our Sky box, which iirc is a Sony unit, seems to be giving up the ghost as it losing channels. As long as I have a Sky account and Sky card, can I buy any satellite receiver to replace it, or do I have to get a new box direct from Sky?

You can buy a new box if you like but you'll need to call Sky and get the new box paired to the old card.

If you don't mind a refurb box, Sky will send someone out for £65, check the system over and repair as necessary. If you go down this route, don't tell them you suspect it's the box when you call up, as they might allocate a refurb to the van stock....if there are no refurbs left on the van there have been cases of people getting new boxes

The old Sky+ boxes are no longer available. They're only doing HD boxes now whether you take out the HD sub or not. I had a 500Gb Amstrad installed a couple of weeks ago and in spite of years of believing that Amstrad are rubbish, the box is very good indeed.

Edited by MonkeyHanger on Wednesday 24th February 13:43

[VEX]

Hi Monkeyhanger,

If you have a new Amstrad HD Box (Sky now own Amstrad BTW) could you check something for me.

Is there power on the USB port at the rear?

I usually fit a laptop cooler under any HD box I work on to help keep them cool, but at an install this week that I went to with a new Amstrad box I could not get the cooler to run connect to the box's USB.

Connected to my laptop it works fine.

Thanks in advance.

V.

[MonkeyHanger]

Just tried charging my phone and it appears to be dead.

[VEX]

Cheers and Bugger at the same time.

Will have to source power from somewhere else now.

V.