Newbie Here help with sky service in a care home

Hello good evening.
I have come to seek your advice with a seemingly trivial issue but that is causing us a lot of trouble.

I am a carer in a small project for adults with learning disabilities. The house was set up in february this year and already had a sky dish and a box. One of our clients asked to have sky hd + sky sports installed in his room so we rang them and the engineer came and set up a second, better dish in his room.
He then realized that the other box + dish still workedworked so we connected the other tv.in the communal lounge. It worked fine until today.

From what we have established so far, none of the sockets that come from the old dish are working. We then tried to plug a regular freeview box to the old dish but it doesn't work either. The old dish and the plugs that come off it have the old style plug, while the new one (the one we are actually paying for) has the plug with the screw fitting.

The situation is causing a lot of upset amongst the clients as it is now disrupting their leisure and they become very upset.

We know that if we ring sky we gonna be asked for money they just don't have at the moment. What iwant to ask, before we do anything else is:

-Has the box+aerial been disconnected remotely by sky or is it likely to be a fault?
-Do we need to fit another aerial before we can use a regular freeview box?

Thank you for ur time, please ask for more information if needed. Hope to hear back x

Please

Hi Andrea

Welcome to the forum

Well we are having terminology problems here. Freeview is digital DVB-T, terestrial TV through an aerial. If you had programs from a dish initially you had FREESAT, free to air satellite TV. If this has stopped working there could be many reasons for this, one being the dish has moved, one being the lnb has died, another could be a cable cut, it could be the sky stb has failed. Are you able to receive anything at all, is the sky set top box working at all?

The box comes on as normal buy informs that there is no signal. All the menus are there as normal.

I see, a freesat box, not freeview, but odds are it won't work either, since thr box has no signal.

The dish is screwed in place tightly but is pointing about 15 degrees compared with the other one. I cant see how it could have moved tho.

Topper said:

Hi Andrea

Welcome to the forum

Well we are having terminology problems here. Freeview is digital DVB-T, terestrial TV through an aerial. If you had programs from a dish initially you had FREESAT, free to air satellite TV. If this has stopped working there could be many reasons for this, one being the dish has moved, one being the lnb has died, another could be a cable cut, it could be the sky stb has failed. Are you able to receive anything at all, is the sky set top box working at all?

Click to expand...

Well it should be pointing in exactly the same direction as the other dish so somebody must have moved the dish, but I would not like to suggest it was the sky engineer
Could the window cleaner have accidently knocked it with his ladders?
Regardless it seems essential that you first move the dish to the correct position, if it is easily accessible there will probably be weathering marks where it was originally pointing so it may be possible to return the dish to the correct angle yourself

You must know what you are talking about because there was indeed a roof repair carried out 2 days before we lost signal. But is it possible the dish could have been knocked by a ladder but we only losing signal 2 days later.?

You would have lost the signal immediately, as the dish would no longer be pointing at Sky UK.
First might I suggest you connect up your old Sky receiver, to the new dish, by unscrewing the LNB, moving it, and connecting the working LNB. This should prove that the problem lies with the older dish, LNB, or cabling.
You do have options, as most Sky UK installations have a LNB with 4 outputs, so you could move your cable to the second dish and use just the one dish, or have the first dish re-aligned, and the cabling, and LNB, checked.

Your best bet is to call out a local independent satellite or aerial installer, he'll probably not charge a fortune and sort it out quickly.